Tapping the capabilities of big data has become increasingly important for healthcare organizations in recent years. But as HIT expert Adheet Gogate notes, the transition is not an easy one, forcing these organizations to migrate from legacy data management systems to new systems designed specifically for use with new types of data.
Gogate, who serves as vice president of consulting at Citius Tech, rightly points out that even when hospitals and health systems spend big bucks on new technology, they may not see any concrete benefits. But if they move through the big data rollout process correctly, their efforts are more likely to bear fruit, he suggests. And he offers four steps organizations can take to ease this transition. They include:
- Have the right mindset: Historically, many healthcare leaders came up through the business in environments where retrieving patient data was difficult and prone to delays, so their expectations may be low. But if they hope to lead successful big data efforts, they need to embrace the new data-rich environment, understand big data’s potential and ask insightful questions. This will help to create a data-oriented culture in their organization, Gogate writes.
- Learn from other industries: Bear in mind that other industries have already grappled with big data models, and that many have seen significant successes already. Healthcare leaders should learn from these industries, which include civil aviation, retail and logistics, and consider adopting their approaches. In some cases, they might want to consider bringing an executive from one of these industries on board at a leadership level, Gogate suggests.
- Employ the skills of data scientists: To tame the floods of data coming into their organization, healthcare leaders should actively recruit data scientists, whose job it is to translate the requirements of the methods, approaches and processes for developing analytics which will answer their business questions. Once they hire such scientists, leaders should be sure that they have the active support of frontline staffers and operations leaders to make sure the analyses they provide are useful to the team, Gogate recommends.
- Think like a startup: It helps when leaders adopt an entrepreneurial mindset toward big data rollouts. These efforts should be led by senior leaders comfortable with this space, who let key players act as their own enterprise first and invest in building critical mass in data science. Then, assign a group of core team members and frontline managers to areas where analytics capabilities are most needed. Rotate these teams across the organization to wherever business problems reside, and let them generate valuable improvement insights. Over time, these insights will help the whole organization improve its big data capabilities, Gogash says.
Of course, taking an agile, entrepreneurial approach to big data will only work if it has widespread support, from the C-suite on down. Also, healthcare organizations will face some concrete barriers in building out big data capabilities, such as recruiting the right data scientists and identifying and paying for the right next-gen technology. Other issues include falling reimbursements and the need to personalize care, according to healthcare CIO David Chou.
But assuming these other challenges are met, embracing big data with a willing-to-learn attitude is more likely to work than treating it as just another development project. And the more you learn, the more successful you’ll be in the future.
Everything above makes sense but there is something I’d emphasize – HealthIT does not have some sort of special ability and knowledge, let alone wisdom, that does not already exist in other areas of IT (let alone big data). The area that I think most resembles HealthIT is FinancialIT – it shares all sorts of data privacy and security problems, needs to be real time, has all sorts of interoperability needs and issues, and has to be super reliable. The problem here is that many bastions of HealthIT won’t even talk to people outside their ‘field’, let alone hire them, or learn anything from them. For HealthIT to ‘get’; big data and many other things right, they need to look at and welcome in their fellow IT specialists from FinancialIT.