Can We Answer Questions In Healthcare To Improve Patient Care & Cost?

The Healthcare industry is going through a tremendous change with one of the largest transitions being in the area of "Data". Fueled by new governmental and payer directions, funding and regulations the industry must re-shape how it has done everything. The industry is spending billions of dollars to improve its ability to collect and process data to improve the patient experience, coverage and reduce cost.

However, one of the areas under-utilized is how to take newly created data and put it to use in answering the right questions.

This is where the use of Analytics (past, present and future predicting), Big-Data processing, master data management and data repositories must be joined together to form the back-bone of a new data architecture to quickly answer questions, questions that we know and those that will come. The following illustration outlines this concept.

Analytics tools can be developed in-house or purchased. There are many vendors with an impressive array of out-of-box packages. However, understand that answering questions of yesterday and today will not be the same moving forward. Thus, a balance must be formed between purchased and internal development analytics.

Big-Data is the new trend for healthcare. Big Data technologies cover a wide range of products and every vendor has established their technology as the ideal fit. Big Data is the means to capture and quickly process data into a set of advance analytics so you can do one thing - understand and answer questions. Keep this as your goal to avoid the technology debates.

Master Data Management (MDM) has become more relevant since all data will NOT reside in one system. To truly answer the questions of today and tomorrow you will need to reach and process a vast amount of data from many internal and external sources, refer to out side ring of the illustration. MDM algorithms and 360 modeling will help you do this. Not all MDM offerings will be able to support this. Thus, proof-of-concept tests are highly recommended when selecting a MDM tool.

Data Repositories, for a traditionalist this could mean a data warehouse. However, today's and tomorrow's data repositories will come in many forms such as virtual data integration to data marts. Big Data approaches will also influence what defines a data repository. In the future the best data repositories will be many of the sources shown on the out side ring of the illustration that best gets to data about the person/patient.

As companies start to pursue this path many challenges and opinions will surface for like all business entities there will be the need to align goals, strategies, policies, processes and organization roles. There's an old saying about information is power, data is what creates information (answers) so there will be the need to have a carefully thought out approach to utilizing the right resources and setting the correct priorities for the new architecture of answering questions.

In future articles we will review these concepts and approaches.