Many of our sponsor partners participated in the 2017 AHIP Institute & Exhibition in Austin, Texas earlier this month – sharing info on their healthcare products and services; and sharing information via informal and formal presentation sessions.
Bill Fox, VP of Healthcare and Life Sciences of our sponsor MarkLogic, moderated a panel titled “Operationalize Before You Analyze: Innovation and Growth Powered by Data.” The panel of business and technical leaders discussed how they have used “next gen” data strategy, architecture and technology to achieve innovation, growth and modernization results. Panel members included:
Sunil Godbole, Senior Director, Application Development at Aetna Inc.
Glen Schuster, Consultant, former CTO at Centene Corp
Shahran Haider, Managing Director of Enterprise Data Strategy and Analytics at L.A. Care
Analyzing Data and Operationalizing Data Are Not the Same Thing
Bill Fox began the panel discussion by offering that analyzing data and operationalizing data are not the same thing and that many health care organizations have focused their innovation and growth investment on the “shiny ball” of analytics — the end stage of the data journey — instead of first improving the agility and speed at the beginning “operational” stages of the data journey.
Save Time on Operations – More Time for Innovation
Glen Schuster: “When companies try to do operations and analytics at same time, it’s operations that almost always ‘wins’”
Sharan Haider: “Now is the time to innovate. And to do that, organizations have to free up time and iterate through faster execution cycles that add more value to operations while improving member and consumer experience.”
Sharan Haider: “If we shorten the amount of time needed to get data together, we can innovate and do analytics better and faster.”
Flexible, Secure, Multi-Model Database Systems are Key
Bill Fox: “Next generation systems must be able to provide users with what they want, how they want it, and when they want it. Data can’t be siloed across numerous legacy systems but must be virtualized in a multi-model database capable of supporting multiple data models against a single, integrated back end where structured and unstructured data in multiple formats are all supported by a flexible and secure infrastructure.”
Glen Schuster: “Value-based reimbursement and managing risk demand that healthcare firms deal with their legacy architecture and employ the resources necessary to facilitate change. Data is classically under reported. A company that can gather data and improve its quality will be in a better position to manage its risk and gain a significant competitive advantage.”
Rapid Implementation with Proven Business Case
Glen Schuster: “It’s easier now to create a hard dollar business case for operationalizing data. Do you know where your data is? How difficult is it to collect, combine and operationalize your data? Over-analyzing cost vs. worth can be an unproductive conversation.”
Sharan Haider: “I know I have a problem. I come to conferences and get excited at what I see. But I’m also a realist. I need to be able to implement solutions from my point of view. To be able to collect, merge and manage my data better and faster.”
Sharan Haider: “We are working to develop a 360 view of our provider customer service, appeals and grievances data in 4-6 weeks. What was a long-term pain and seemed unsolvable was suddenly doable.”
Centers of Excellence and Scaled Agile Framework
Sunil Godbole: “We had an impossible data problem and started our journey 2 ½ ago. We strive to make whatever we build with reusable assets. We established a Center of Excellence (COE) and got the best resources available on market. Our COE performs governance, builds frameworks (ex. Logging, alerts, ingest and egress methods, etc.) that we can extend to all lines of business, affiliates, and other data centers.”
Sunil Godbole: “Code quality has to be present. We employ a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and consistently enforce its use. We do brown bags with scrum teams, new developers and business stakeholders to maintain and grow our skills based and data agility-focused culture.”
Learn More About Healthcare Innovation & Transformation
For more insight and ideas on digitally transforming your healthcare operations and analytics, check out our sponsor partners and consider following the Healthcare Executive Group and our sponsors on social media.
Change Healthcare –> @Change_HC
Cumberland Consulting Group –> @CumberlandCG
GuideWell Connect –> @_GWConnect
HealthEdge –> @HealthEdge
MarkLogic –> @MarkLogic
McKesson –> @McKesson
Softheon –> @Softheon
Virtual Health –> @VirtualHealth_
