Our Executive Leadership Forum held at the GuideWell Innovation Center on Monday, May 8th was attended by 21 healthcare executives and solution provider thought leaders. The three-hour event – titled Operationalizing Before Analyzing: Healthcare’s Modern Journey Powered by Data – focused on some of the underlying challenges and issues regarding how healthcare data and analytics technologies impact consumers, providers and health plans.
The forum included lively discussion on real world use cases for healthcare data and analytics, a demonstration of live 3D interaction possibilities and a tour of the GuideWell Innovation Center. The forum was capped off by a happy hour for participants to network with each other and forum sponsors: MarkLogic and Intel.
In this post, highlights of the discussion between forum participants and key takeaways will be presented. In future posts, an overview of the 3D interaction demo and tour of the GuideWell Innovation Center will be shared.
HCEG Board Chair Ferris Taylor shared some information on the tour of the GuideWell Innovation Center and Live 3D Collaboration in this post on LinkedIn.
Demand for Real-time Data and Transactions
A lot discussion during the forum centered around current complexities and how demand for real-time data and transactions—across clinical, administrative and financial operations–is increasing exponentially every day and putting significant demands on service model / operations and legacy infrastructure, which are mostly batch / file transfer oriented. Several issues were identified as current concerns:
- Many underlying data challenges
- Lack of agility in quickly responding to opportunities
- Inadequate data governance/provenance with ETL approaches in the legacy data pipeline
All audience members agreed they wanted faster time to market and better ability to respond to clients / market / regulations and be more agile when it comes to data. There was broad agreement that “data integration” is a journey that should follow a new data integration pathway instead of the legacy Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) approach:
Real World Use Cases
Over the course of the discussion there were a number of data capture and analytics use cases shared between forum participants. One use case described enrollment data submitted to the IRS on the 1095-B Health Coverage forms sent to individuals noting their qualified health coverage during each month in the year.
One participant described how the IRS had reported back to the health plan that 40% of the records submitted by the health plan to the IRS had errors in name, social security number and/or dependent status; basic required enrollment data elements that the plan was not able to validate or authenticate during the initial enrollment process and remained that way throughout the entire year. Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.
This “1095-B use case” elicited feedback from one forum participant having recent experience at the Census Bureau with the participant describing how government agencies often don’t have complete, accurate data. Just because CMS might have data of one quality level, they don’t always share that data with related agencies so the IRS or the SSA or state Medicaid administrators likely have different data.
Leverage All Data Types & 3rd Parties
Forum participants shared unique perspectives and a Q&A ensued on the example of how the Census Bureau uses associated data to significantly improve the timelines, accuracy and overall value of census data by editing it against 3rd party sources. This Census Bureau use case and another use case described by forum participants of a BCBS plan emphasized that 3rd party data sources and unstructured data are very important to service improvement, member/patient experience, innovation and growth-oriented project investments.
Primary Investment Areas: Data Improvement & Integration Projects
Forum members identified the following investment areas for data improvement and integration projects that healthcare executives may implement over the next 12-18 months to modernize healthcare data and applications:
Thought Leader Presentations
This Executive Leadership Forum was co-sponsored by MarkLogic and Intel. The information shared by these two sponsors are made available here:
“Healthcare ‘Next Gen’ Data Projects” – Bill Gaynor, U.S. Healthcare Director – MarkLogic, Inc.
“Intel Healthcare Security Readiness Program Overview” – Joan Hankin – Global Director of Marketing & Business Development – Healthcare & Life Sciences at Intel Corporation
In addition to information shared by MarkLogic and Intel, Constance Sjoquist, former Research Director at Gartner, also participated:
“Disrupting the Status Quo in Healthcare” – By Constance Sjoquist, Chief Content Officer – HLTH, LLC.
Three Basic Tenets Unanimously Agreed
At the end of the forum, participants unanimously agree on three basic tenets:
- Complete and accurate data – especially basic demographic and social determinants – MUST begin with the first member/consumer/patient-provider interactions at the point of service
- Data needs to be authenticated, validated, verified and ENRICHED against other sources – then normalized across other supportive partners and their ‘systems of record’
- Today’s technology can support the capture, validation and use of healthcare data on a relatively inexpensive basis.
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