Three Questions for Your Healthcare Data Strategy
Posted by Nick Diamond on 14 August 2016 11:15 AM |
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Healthcare organizations have started to think about data and the role that it should play in achieving business objectives in new ways. In fact, for many successful healthcare organizations, the (once bright) line between data strategy and business strategy has become blurred. With healthcare data projected to grow to a staggering 25,000 petabytes by 2020—for context, just one petabyte can hold 500 billion pages of standard printed text—developing a flexible, comprehensive data strategy is critical to a sustainable and competitive enterprise. Whether you are a payer, provider, or somewhere in between, what questions should you be asking about your data strategy?
Equally, the downstream uses of healthcare data have shifted. As an application-rich environment, any healthcare data strategy must facilitate easy and rapid application development in order to support consumer-centric enterprise initiatives or development of patient-facing tools for the bedside, among other key uses. For example, as providers continue to expand population health-focused initiatives—and transition to risk-based reimbursement models that measure and reward better health outcomes—they increasingly look to incorporate data sources not traditionally stored in electronic health records (EHRs) into clinical workflows. This data may include income, education, housing, and social services data. A robust data strategy should enable a view across non-EHR data sources to augment tailored clinical interventions for specific patients. Data strategy is no longer just the province of the IT department. Embracing a data-centric approach to data strategy development ensures that any healthcare organization can build in the architectural flexibility and fine-grained security to adapt to the evolving payer and provider landscape. In particular, implementing a data strategy that eliminates the traditional friction between observe-the-business and run-the-business functions maximizes business value by moving away from an approach that merely “wrangles” the data. It’s time for healthcare organizations to treat their data strategy as a source of competitive advantage at the enterprise business level. Three Questions for Your Healthcare Data Strategy from MarkLogic. | |