By leveraging a large, de-identified dataset from Epic’s comprehensive network, Epic Cosmos empowers healthcare organizations to unlock insights that drive clinical decision-making, improve patient outcomes, and enhance operational efficiency. With its advanced tools for research, benchmarking, and predictive analytics, Epic Cosmos enables providers to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving healthcare industry.
This article explores the features, benefits, and real-world applications of Epic Cosmos, highlighting its transformative impact on modern healthcare organizations.
Key Takeaways
- Epic Cosmos is an electronic health record data aggregation platform that enhances research and patient care by standardizing data across multiple healthcare organizations.
- Governance is maintained by a Governing Council to ensure responsible data use and maintain data integrity and confidentiality.
- Epic Cosmos employs robust data aggregation and quality control mechanisms, utilizing standardized ontologies to improve data accuracy, and supports multiple healthcare applications, including chronic disease surveillance and vaccine safety monitoring.
What is Epic Cosmos?
Epic Cosmos is an electronic health record data aggregation platform designed to enhance healthcare research and patient care. Enabling extensive health data analysis across multiple states, Epic Cosmos transcends isolated data silos, creating a unified, learning healthcare system. This allows healthcare organizations to standardize their data submissions and collaborate more effectively with other medical institutions.
Epic Cosmos has the potential for future iterations to incorporate data from diverse EHR systems, enhancing inter-vendor data collaboration. This further expands its utility, enabling comprehensive analysis and insights and improving healthcare outcomes.
Governance and Structure of Epic Cosmos
Epic Cosmos governance is overseen by a Governing Council, which ensures representation from various executives, researchers, and clinicians. This council is responsible for maintaining data usage standards and overseeing operations.
Participation in Cosmos is voluntary for Epic EHR customers, who must agree to specific guidelines co-developed by the Epic corporation and the Governing Council. These guidelines, known as the ‘Rules of the Road,’ ensure that data contributions are managed efficiently and responsibly, though they are proprietary and not publicly published.
Access to Cosmos data is limited to individuals affiliated with approved health systems or academic medical centers, ensuring a controlled environment for data usage. Users must also disclose their intended use and funding sources before accessing the deidentified data within Cosmos.
This governance structure helps maintain the integrity and responsible use of data, ensuring that the insights derived from Epic Cosmos are reliable and ethical.
Data Aggregation and Quality Control
Epic Cosmos provides intelligent data aggregation and quality control functionality, promoting efficient data standardization across contributing healthcare systems and enhancing research through a cohesive and comprehensive data set. Utilizing standardized ontologies, Cosmos significantly enhances the accuracy and usability of electronic health records (EHRs), providing clear definitions and structured data entries that mirror real-world complexities.
Epic Cosmos primarily relies on existing health information exchange networks to facilitate efficient data aggregation. Submissions are categorized into historical backload and event-driven triggered data, allowing for comprehensive data representation while easing operational loads on participating organizations. This process ensures that high-quality clinical data, which is comprehensive, accessible, accurate, consistent, and timely, supports effective healthcare practices and research.
Despite these efforts, maintaining data quality poses challenges, such as inaccuracies from free-text entries and inconsistencies across different organizations. To address these, Cosmos employs predefined standards and well-defined ontologies, enhancing data granularity and ensuring clinical data points are both meaningful and actionable.
Types of Data Submissions in Cosmos
Data submissions to Epic Cosmos are divided into two main categories: historical backload and event-driven triggered data. Historical backload data includes records submitted before an organization joined Cosmos, typically processed in stages to prioritize more recent entries. This phased approach ensures that the most relevant data is readily available for analysis while easing the operational load on participating organizations and allowing them to contribute data.
Triggered data submissions are automatically generated based on specific events, such as the closure of a patient encounter or the filing of a result. This method ensures timely updates to the Cosmos data set, with encounter records transmitted if no action is detected within seven days. By prioritizing recent data, Cosmos maintains an up-to-date repository that delivers real-time healthcare insights.
Ensuring Data Privacy and Security
Ensuring data privacy and security is paramount in the Epic Cosmos landscape. The platform uses robust encryption methods to protect patient data during transmission and storage, adhering to HIPAA regulations to ensure confidentiality. All personal identifiers are removed from patient data before transferring it from healthcare organizations, further safeguarding patient privacy.
Using a limited dataset and encryption methods, Epic Cosmos guarantees patient information remains secure while offering valuable insights for healthcare research. The platform’s adherence to HIPAA regulations underscores its commitment to maintaining the highest data privacy and security standards and delivering reliable healthcare data analytics.
Accessing and Utilizing Cosmos Data
Accessing and utilizing Cosmos data is designed to be secure and efficient. Epic provides intelligent tools for healthcare organizations to facilitate secure data exchange through established frameworks, ensuring data is protected and accessible for research. Clinicians authorized to access Cosmos can quickly obtain clinical answers without submitting traditional data requests, further streamlining the research process.
For those not eligible for direct access, collaboration with a participating organization or submitting study ideas through Epic Research are viable alternatives. This inclusive approach ensures that a wide range of users can benefit from the insights generated by Cosmos, fostering a collaborative environment for healthcare research.
Current Reach and Impact of Epic Cosmos
Since its launch in 2018, Epic Cosmos has aggregated data from hundreds of healthcare sites across the United States. This extensive reach has facilitated significant public health research by providing access to a large repository of clinical data. By aggregating real-world healthcare data from multiple institutions, Cosmos enables comprehensive analyses that inform public health initiatives and improve clinical outcomes.
The rise in data contributions from Epic customers has further enhanced the platform’s utility, making it an invaluable resource for healthcare research. As Cosmos continues to grow, its impact on the healthcare landscape is set to expand, offering new opportunities for data-driven insights and innovations.
Critical Use Cases for the Epic Cosmos Application
From chronic disease surveillance to vaccine safety monitoring, Epic’s ability to aggregate and analyze data across multiple institutions provides invaluable insights for healthcare. The following sections will explore specific use cases, demonstrating how Cosmos data is leveraged to improve patient care and public health.
Chronic Disease Surveillance
Epic Cosmos plays a crucial role in chronic disease surveillance by integrating various data sources, such as administrative records, vital signs, and demographics. This comprehensive approach allows for accurate tracking of chronic conditions, with data showing key trends in patient health and safety.
The ability to monitor chronic diseases through detailed clinical data points enhances public health initiatives and helps healthcare providers tailor interventions more effectively. The CDC, for instance, uses interactive applications to provide free access to chronic disease data, highlighting the importance of such surveillance systems in evaluating health programs and identifying research needs.
Syndromic Surveillance
Syndromic surveillance is another critical application of Epic Cosmos, particularly in tracking diseases like influenza and COVID-19.
By utilizing laboratory data, Cosmos can identify and analyze seasonal influenza and COVID-19 spread patterns, providing real-time insights into infection rates across various geographical locations. This allows public health officials to track the impact of outbreaks and assess disease trends effectively.
Immunization Adherence
Epic Cosmos also facilitates the assessment of immunization adherence. By allowing users to perform detailed queries that account for both initial and follow-up vaccination rates, Cosmos delivers valuable insights into immunization adherence and helps identify key improvement areas.
Vaccine Safety Monitoring
The Epic Cosmos platform allows for the real-time tracking of vaccine safety across a large population by analyzing outcomes following vaccinations for potential adverse effects.
By aggregating vaccine-related data from multiple institutions, Cosmos enriches the understanding of vaccine safety trends and enables comparative analyses between different vaccines to identify safety signals and adverse events.
Health Services Research
Epic Cosmos supports health services research by providing timely and relevant data analyses that inform clinical practice and health policy. Offering free access to research findings through Epic Research, the initiative aids clinicians and decision-makers in addressing timely health questions and improving patient care. This collaborative approach ensures the insights from Cosmos data benefit the broader healthcare community.
Statistical Methods Applied in Cosmos Research
Epic Cosmos employs various statistical methods to analyze its vast data set. Chi-square tests, including the chi-square goodness of fit and the chi-square test of independence, are commonly used to assess the frequency distribution of categorical variables and their relationships. These tests are essential for comparing proportions and determining statistical significance in health research.
When sample sizes are small, or frequencies are low, alternative methods like Fisher’s exact test are applied to ensure the accuracy of the analysis. The selection of appropriate statistical tests is influenced by the distribution of data. Normally distributed data use mean and standard deviation, while skewed data utilize median and interquartile ranges. These statistical methods ensure the reliability of findings derived from Cosmos data.
Clinical Relevance and Future Directions
The clinical relevance of Epic Cosmos lies in its ability to generate actionable insights that improve patient care and inform critical healthcare practices. Utilizing continuous data analysis from patient care, Learning Health Systems (LHS) like Cosmos enrich knowledge transfer and healthcare delivery.
The platform’s flexible querying capabilities empower users to derive insights from shared health data across participating organizations, supporting rapid scalability and integration with existing health information exchange networks.
As more institutions join the network and data contributions rise, the Cosmos platform’s potential to transform healthcare research and patient outcomes will only grow. Continuous advancements in data standards and interoperability will further enhance the utility of Cosmos, making it an essential tool for clinicians, researchers, and policymakers.
How Can We Help?
Whether you need help assessing your current Epic EHR setup to identify key improvement areas, additional support maintaining an integrated data set across clinical data points, or an extra hand navigating complex integrations across Epic and non-Epic applications, Surety Systems can help.
Our senior-level Epic consultants have the skills and experience to understand your critical project needs and ensure your internal teams are prepared for continuous improvement over time. For more information about our Epic consulting services or to get started on a project, contact us today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Epic Cosmos?
Epic Cosmos is an electronic health record data aggregation platform created by Epic Systems to improve healthcare research and patient care through comprehensive health data analysis across various regions.
How does Epic Cosmos ensure data privacy and security?
Epic Cosmos guarantees data privacy and security through robust encryption methods, the removal of personal identifiers from patient data before transfer, and strict adherence to HIPAA regulations. This comprehensive approach effectively safeguards sensitive information.
What types of data submissions are there in Epic Cosmos?
Epic Cosmos accommodates two types of data submissions: historical backload and event-driven triggered data. This distinction ensures that the database receives both comprehensive past data and timely updates.
What are some use cases of Epic Cosmos data?
Epic Cosmos data is essential for chronic disease surveillance, immunization adherence, and health services research, offering critical insights that enhance public health and patient care. These applications demonstrate the value of data in monitoring and improving health outcomes effectively.
