Case Study: Presbyterian Health Plan, Inc.

Background:

Presbyterian Health Plan (PHP) is a healthcare provider that takes care of more than 418,000 people in New Mexico. It is part of the Presbyterian Healthcare Services family, which is a private, not-for-profit healthcare system that has been around since 1908. Presbyterian is the biggest healthcare provider in the state and provides the largest health plan in New Mexico. Overall, Presbyterian employs more than 9,000 people across the state.

Need:

The contact center service representatives at the Presbyterian Health Plan were having trouble finding the information they needed because it was spread out in many different documents. It was made even harder because each department had its way of organizing the documents, and sometimes important information was missing. The different methods were not the same and made it difficult to find what was needed.

Presbyterian needed:

They needed a way to combine and organize the different ways that each department categorized their documents into one system. This system needed to be clear and specific. They decided to use a thesaurus to accomplish this.
Presbyterian Health Plan needed a good way to search for medical information. They chose the well-respected thesaurus, the Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH, that is used by the U.S. National Library of Medicine to index articles from medical journals. This helped them to find and organize the medical information they needed.

Solution:

The people at Access Innovations used the Data Harmony software to modify MeSH to make a new thesaurus. They worked closely with the specialists at PHP to make sure the thesaurus met PHP’s needs. Data Harmony was very useful in connecting MeSH terms with the words that Presbyterian Health Plan staff used. They also made sure that Data Harmony worked well with an Oracle document management system and added some special features to make things easier.

Results:

Access Innovations created a thesaurus using Data Harmony that merged the categorization systems of various departments and a medical taxonomy recognized globally. This allowed staff members from different departments to easily find documents owned by other departments, despite variations in the language used. Furthermore, the addition of MeSH subject headings improved the ability to find documents related to specific medical conditions and treatments.