InterSystems Virtual Summit 2020: Day One Focus Session Recap

Day One Summary	Day Two Summary	Day Three Summary

2020 marks the first year ever of InterSystems’ Global Summit going virtual! Join us from October 20th to November 5th as we recap various sessions of this year’s event.

Today is the start of the Focus Sessions, where the product managers we heard from last week return to give us a deeper dive into new features and technologies. Our team attended some of these sessions, and we’ve provided highlights below. Miss Tuesday’s presentations? You can still view the recordings. Register for free here.

Need a refresher on the keynote sessions from last week? We’ve got you covered.

• Day One Keynote Summary
• Day Two Keynote Summary
• Day Three Keynote Summary

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Adaptive Analytics in InterSystems IRIS

Summary by: Aaron Milberger, Principal Consultant, J2 Interactive

InterSystem Business Intelligence (formerly DeepSee) works best for a segment of more technical-minded users. The data modeling is suitable for situations where the data is not too large, and the models are fairly stagnant. The goal of “Adaptive Analytics” is to provide analytics data in a new way. “Adaptive Analytics” is a layer between 3rd party tools and the IRIS database, allowing end-users on their favorite BI tool such as PowerBI and Tableau. The product allows for virtual data modeling, which removes the need for rebuilding cubes and allows a consistent representation of the data across users and use cases without the need for the users to understand the underlying structures. Another feature of the product is the adaptive aspect where the system tracks what’s being asked. Based on these requests, it will make improvements to better respond in the future.

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Demonstration: Adaptive Analytics in InterSystems IRIS

Summary by: Michael Bries, Senior Consultant, J2 Interactive

Adaptive Analytics is a native integration between IRIS and AtScale. Analytics projects can be built in AtScale, a tool similar to other cube building platforms where you define your tables, relationships, calculations, and measures. The presenter showed the definition of a new measure in a sales database containing 1 billion rows, which was then immediately accessible through tools such as Tableau or Excel.

On the backend, the pivot table queries were shown in several stages:

• What the Tableau querying tool sent to AtScale
• The machine learning-based optimization of that query to use or create new “aggregations” (basically data caches) of the data in IRIS in real-time
• The same query executed in Excel using MDX, which was translated into SQL by AtScale, but in a much more succinct expression (and efficient performance-wise) than it was when the query was initially run by the first tool

The presenter also discussed AtScale creating a ‘semantic layer’ or translation that would allow the backend data to be exposed in a much more business analyst friendly way.

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Showcasing Health Insight & Integrated ML for Healthcare Applications

Summary by: Aaron Milberger, Principal Consultant, J2 Interactive

TechSpring, an innovation arm of Baystate Health, exists to experiment and innovate with their software and vendor partners. The TechSpring ecosphere includes a number of HealthShare UCR, Health Insight, and now IRIS environments. In this presentation, near real-time data is transferred from Baystate’s live Health Insight instance to TechSpring using the Health Insight persistent request feature. Within TechSpring InterSystems’ database mirroring is used to provide a read-only copy of the Health Insight tables within an IRIS for Health instance. The presentation included a demonstration of Machine Learning on that IRIS for Health instance using the new IntegratedML feature and DataRobot (external AI software.) IntegratedML enriches SQL with new verbs allowing users without specialized experience to build, train, and validate predictive models all within InterSystems.

To view the IntegratedML portion of the presentation, Thomas Dyar shared it on GitHub.

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On the Horizon: Extended Decision Support

Summary by: Nathan Elliott, Senior Consultant, J2 Interactive

At its core, EDS is a CDS Hooks service endpoint, rule editor, and rule execution service. The solution enables simple, non-coding authorship of FHIR-based rules at any point in a clinical workflow, exposing those rules through a CDS Hooks endpoint and empowering the same logic engine for real-time event notification. InterSystems is planning to continue to develop EDS by hardening the solution, adding a CQL execution engine, and support CDS Hooks feedback.

Viewers interested in piloting the alpha release are encouraged to contact Frank Pandolfe directly:

• Frank.Pandolfe@InterSystems.com
• linkedin.com/in/frank-pandolfe 

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Improving InterSystems IRIS with Customer-Focused Benchmarks

Summary by: Nathan Elliott, Senior Consultant, J2 Interactive

InterSystems supports customers by using real-life examples of queries that appear to be delivering slower than expected processing times. Customers submit their observations and de-identified example queries through WRC. If a code improvement opportunity is identified, WRC will engage Mark and his team to conduct performance benchmarking with the sample query, bring in developers and performance engineers to identify performance limitations and design, as well as test solutions to address them. The InterSystems team employs engineering best practices to document, baseline, refine, and quantify improvements on behalf of customers who bring their example queries to them for evaluation.

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Benefits Realization and Clinical Quality Monitoring Using TrakCare

Summary by: Jen Carter, Executive Director of Marketing, J2 Interactive

In the first part of the session, Garreth Estment discussed processes and tools that help healthcare staff quantify and measure the benefits that can be achieved through the introduction of InterSystems TrakCare EMR. Garreth has a 20-year career in healthcare, working in a number of organizations around the world. He talked at a high-level about how to prepare a quality business case for a Healthcare IT project, such as a TrakCare implementation, and suggested that a key step is to identify, quantify and measure the benefits that will be achieved through the introduction of the new solution. He introduced “TrakCare Measure,” a library of metrics and dashboards that can be used, both pre- and post-implementation, to show the value that the investment has brought. By way of example, he cited clients who had reduced waiting times, sped up the production of discharge summaries, increased bed occupancy, and reduced Length of Stay. In one particular case, a client had made savings of $3.8m through the elimination of paper forms.

Janet Seaton led the second half of the presentation. A nurse by background, Seaton has been responsible for leading Quality Improvement programs in NHS hospitals. Now, she is the Product Manager responsible for the new Continuous Quality Improvement features in TrakCare. Every healthcare organization has a responsibility to improve the quality of the care they provide either through audit of the care provided, the introduction of patient safety measures, or an assessment and correction of deficiencies within the patient record. It has always been a laborious manual process to collect, analyze, and present data in such a way that the business can make quality improvements. InterSystems is developing a number of new tools to facilitate and automate this through customizable data collection forms that feed into the patient record, complex analytic tools, and detailed dashboards that present the findings to users and clinicians. These tools are a new product that is already available to TrakCare users operating the most up-to-date versions of the system. Seaton encouraged clients to make use of the tools and feedback into the development cycle for future releases.

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Day One Summary	Day Two Summary	Day Three Summary

Thank you for joining us for today’s recap. J2 has been a trusted InterSystems Implementation Partner since 2004. Learn more about us and our involvement in InterSystems Virtual Summit 2020.