You’re not just a number when you are a patient with CHRISTUS Health, but we do care a lot about the numbers attached to you.

Numbers and data tell important stories about our patients. Your blood pressure, how many calories you eat, how many steps you take each day, and the dosage of your medication are like words in a book that your caregivers are reading.

CHRISTUS Health is taking data and connecting points to help our patients get healthier and prevent them from getting sick. “We care for our patients’ quality of life. We don’t want them to be sick in the first place, but if they are, then we want to help them manage their illness to prevent a bad episode,” says Mavis Girlinghouse, VP of Ambulatory and Data Management Strategies.

In order to do that, CHRISTUS Health has a department called Health Informatics that gathers patient data, analyzes the data, finds patterns, and plugs it into a system that caregivers can use to treat patients. For Health Informatics there is a lot of excitement around having the infrastructure to look at all the data that we have and looking for patterns.

Earlier this year, CHRISTUS Health earned an Informatica Innovation Award for demonstrating vision, creativity and leadership in solutions to transform business through data.

“We are very proud of this Informatica Innovation Award. Everything CHRISTUS Health does is about taking better care of patients. While it was imperative that we control growing volumes of data, we knew that if we did it right, there was an unprecedented opportunity to use data to increase effectiveness and quality of services delivered,” said Mavis Girlinghouse, VP Ambulatory and Data Management Strategies, CHRISTUS Health System.

Using data to guide patient care is a journey, not a destination. Our Business Intelligence Department’s job will never be finished, there will always be a problem for them to solve, a challenge to meet. They will always look for ways to work with the data so our patients never become “just a number.”

Watch this video for more on how data serves our patients.