With so much data in healthcare, how do you make it work for you?
Future-proofing your healthcare organization requires maximizing the benefits of your big data while mitigating the associated risks.
While providers are starting to come together to meaningfully share their data through models like Truveta, hurdles still exist. The timing of payor changes and regulatory updates are misaligned, existing standards are interpreted differently and poorly adopted, and several solutions are sitting on the shelf waiting for payors and providers who aren’t ready to use them.
As the biggest producers of healthcare data, providers must learn how to bring that product to market to transform healthcare experiences and outcomes for the better.
Below are eight ideas to start making progress with your data:
- Start treating your data as an asset. Reframe your organization’s data strategy as something enterprise-wide, not something IT does.
- Don’t let data become a distraction. Define use cases and ensure business cases and outcomes are clear before embarking on any initiative to monetize your data.
- Don’t do recreational analytics. Focus your efforts on projects and initiatives that impact at least 20% of your revenue. Focus on solving value creation problems, not technology problems.
- Get back to basics with your security strategy. Ensure your entire organization has a common understanding of how to share data. Define what you want to do with it early on, map it, and partner with your cybersecurity team to ensure the right safeguards are in place throughout all touch points.
- Push for a national patient identifier. Accelerating innovation and adoption of digital health capabilities requires the ability to consistently and reliably identify and match patients to their health information.
- Crawl, walk, run. Start with a clearly defined use case and get a coalition organized to tackle the problem collectively. We can’t tackle everything at once, but we can start making incremental progress toward a clearly defined vision with clearly defined value.
- Maximize what’s already out there. Learn about the work being done to make progress toward interoperability through initiatives like HL7’s Gravity and Da Vinci projects. The vision is there, the parts are there, and now alignment on regulations is starting to come into focus.
- Don’t try to figure this out alone. Find an experienced partner that has already walked the path. Getting data structured to provide analytics is hard, but actually using that information and making the answers real is even harder and takes a massive amount of orchestration. Leverage peers and partners to help execute on your strategy.
These materials are for general informational purposes only. These materials do not, and are not intended to, constitute legal or compliance advice, and you should not act or refrain from acting based on any information provided in these materials. Neither Ensemble Health Partners, nor any of its employees, are your lawyers. Please consult with your own legal counsel or compliance professional regarding specific legal or compliance questions you have.
