THE PERFECT STORM: ALL THE BUZZ FROM THE HEALTHCARE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SUMMMIT
By Laura Madsen
Earlier this month at its annual Medical Innovations Summit, the Cleveland Clinic released a listing of the Top 10 medical innovations for 2012. While most would expect many of the items on the list, such as a novel diabetes treatment and new discoveries with gene sequencing, one of the list's items took many by surprise. Specifically, according to the list, "harnessing big data to improve healthcare" will be a forthcoming medical innovation.
In May 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published findings after studying "big data" in five domains. According to their research, "If US health care were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year. Two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing US health care expenditure by about eight percent."
Last week, nearly 200 people from provider and payer settings gathered at the Healthcare Business Intelligence Summit offered in its third year in Minneapolis. This year's speakers represented a myriad of organizations including Northeast Georgia Health System, Hennepin County Medical Center, BlueCross BlueShield of Kansas City, and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.
As one of the event's lead organizers, I give credit to my colleagues who served on planning and organizing committees, and also to those who presented and those who attended.
The day was full of sharing information, observations, and insights around business intelligence (BI) in healthcare. In debriefing with colleagues and pondering my own experiences from the day, the following key themes emerged.
THE PERFECT STORM FOR HEALTHCARE BI
Many folks told me they are buckling under the pressure of increasing volumes of data, increasing regulatory requirements, and increasing exposure to data and reports by people across and outside of their organizations. Especially with the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, we have the perfect storm for investment in healthcare data capture, storage, and analytics. Today's organizations must leverage a new and distinct approach to data, one configured specifically for an ever-changing landscape. Yet caution is necessary. Healthcare is a different animal than retail, manufacturing, and finance.
WHAT ABOUT QUALITY?
Concerns exist about the value associated with data. Healthcare data, especially clinical data, can be subjective. It is fragmented and often incomplete, making analysis and knowledge distillation an ongoing issue. While most know that data quality is critically important, most folks don't know how to tackle it. Some have decided that they are better off exposing bad data to end users as a way to demonstrate the impact that these end users themselves can have on the quality of data. This, of course, is not recommended.
WHERE'S THE VALUE?
When talking about data value, a shift is underway. A few years ago at the conference, the question was "Is there value in our data?" Today the question is "How do we determine where there's the most value?"
DATA, DATA EVERYWHERE
As data volume increases, so, too do the challenges of data disparity. Data integration is becoming a hot topic. Everyone knows they need to bring disparate sets of data together. Some have done it successfully.Others are just embarking on the adventure. Yet we all know that as data sources and volumes increase, so does the reliance on "Extract, Transform and Load." ETL is a fundamental practice in business intelligence, yet it is often misunderstood. This seems to be weighing on people's minds.
ACOS, MU, ETC.
Data reliance is becoming a mainstay in healthcare and increasingly important as Meaningful Use continues to evolve and as the new shared risk model of accountable care is adopted. Most people at this year's event agree that the industry needs a higher degree of sophistication associated with data management, reporting, and analytics. When discussing MU, ACOs and the like, most organizations reported feeling ill-prepared.
Representatives from CMS led a heavily-attended breakout, with significant discussion on data warehouses to support Meaningful Use. One attendee, a vendor working with MU in ambulatory care, indicated that nearly 50% of the groups he's worked with in the past few years have more than one EHR and are struggling to determine how to move forward with these multiple environments. One individual from a provider environment said he felt they were being penalized for being an early adopter of EHRs because they had more than one, and as a result, were not sure how to proceed. At this point, they are leaning toward dumping everything and starting over. Even though they will miss some incentives, they will make the final deadline.
The discussion of data EHR and data consolidation raised a major question that's seemingly on most people's minds: will there be a time that ONC/CMS will recognize the need and/or value of a traditional data warehouse for healthcare organizations striving to meet MU? If this happens, how will they handle will certification of processes including data integration, data modeling, and reporting?
Perhaps next year at this time I'll be writing about the ONC's response to this very question. Until then, best wishes with the unique healthcare challenges and opportunities of big data and business intelligence.
About Laura Madsen
Laura helps companies understand the value of their data. As the Health Care Practice Leader for Lancet Software, Madsen brings more than 10 years experience in Business Intelligence (BI). She served as Director of Business Intelligence at a pharmacy benefit management company where she led an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence project. She is also a veteran of United Health Group, where she managed a Business Intelligence tool suite. Through this work, she has started or supported more than a dozen companies with BI initiatives. You may reach her at lmadsen@lancetsoftware.com.