Leveraging information to improve performance is a “must-have” core competency that all healthcare CIOs are striving for today, and enterprise data warehousing is a preferred avenue to do just that.
According to Gartner, most organizations do not have the information, processes and tools needed to make informed, responsive enterprise decisions due to underinvestment in an information infrastructure at the enterprise level.
“In traditional companies, departments manage analytics—number-crunching functions select their own tools and train their own people. But that way, chaos lies,” wrote Thomas Davenport in his book Competing On Analytics.
For this reason, among others, it is important for healthcare CIOs, both payer and provider, to begin to strongly consider finding ways to implement an enterprise data warehouse [EDW] initiative, that is aligned with key business strategies and needs, in order to finally organize and secure their data. It provides IT leaders with the support of realtime decision-making. This is even more crucial in times like these where we are on the brink of massive changes to the healthcare industry, in which certain data requirements must be met.
Essentia Health, a hospital and clinic organization in need of an EDW, CIOs haven’t implemented one yet, but have made tremendous progress in getting the infrastructure and governance in place for the data governance components. They have the organization moving forward with the initiative.
“The onset of the project is to get the organization to buy in that this is a strategic project [which is not going to happen overnight], and we, as an organization, had to rally around the need for enterprise data warehousing as we embark upon our ACO strategy, meaningful use etc. We had to do something different than our operational databases,” said Ken Gilles, CIO of Essentia Health.
With an enterprise level forum in place to oversee EDW prioritization and data governance, Essentia Health is on the positive path. “It’s going to provide more meaningful data than we have available today—it will provide more of the data to know what we are getting into and how we will need to function in environments such as health management entry and risk-sharing arrangements,” said Gilles.
Similar to Essentia Health’s EDW initiative, Orlando Health, one of Florida’s most comprehensive private and not-for-profit healthcare networks including community hospitals, specialized hospitals and a world-class cancer center, has an EDW in the works. It already has its EDW (Healthcare DataWorks product) platform in place with its pilot deliverable and an analytics executive governance structure being formed. It is in the process of continuing to inventory its resources: departmental BI/DSS technologies, reporting sources and supporting staff before its initial data load validation, although it has about 10 percent of it populated at this time.
Orlando Health’s CIO, Rick Schooler, was just named the CIO of the Year at HIMSS 2012 in Las Vegas this past February. He is the 23rd recipient of the award, and has worked in the healthcare industry for 21 years. In a conversation with Schooler about his EDW implementation, he said that he is primarily looking for “one source of truth” to act as a feeder to all of the different kinds of internal and external reporting services with his organization, as well as the data mining, analytics and data analysis efforts that every provider organization conducts.
“We cant keep doing the kinds of data extracting and BI in our respective silos that we are doing—it just isn’t going to work in the future of healthcare. It’s got to be integrated information that really gives the true complete picture for whatever the need. With the changes ahead, the healthcare industry is going to be a completely different world. We’ve got to get our hands around all the information, and get it into a consolidated and integrated single source of truth that can serve the entire organization,” said Schooler.
With all successful plans come some challenges, and EDW initiatives are no different. Some challenges include: key organization champions either delaying or denying to be on board with the project; departmental data ownership issues; the quality of the data; hiring knowledgeable and experienced staff; or competing projects that may take precedence. “Probably the main challenge is migrating the data to the warehouse from all of the different sources of data, whether it’s internal or external, from all of the different systems that we have,” said Gilles.
“The biggest challenge in doing EDW is getting to the point of having the kind of capability to harness all of the different source systems. Furthermore, getting that information extracted, transformed and loaded into a warehouse platform that people will see as credible, will trust and will begin to use, as compared to the point-to-point interfaces or extracts that they get in the source systems dumping into their tool of choice, which they are convinced is the truth,” said Schooler.
He also explained that there is a challenging need for the right team of experts, who know the know the data inside and out, know the EDW model and the data mining tools to make sure that it’s valid before it goes into the warehouse. Most healthcare organizations don’t have the needed skill sets sitting on their payroll, so recruiting the right people to be on this team—with the right skill set and the right kind of experience—is going to be absolutely critical to success. Orlando Health currently has 10 to 15 people on their EDW team, and is growing by the day.
So, what would be these CIOs’ advice to other healthcare CIOs out there? Get it sold, get it bought in and get the right people behind it. As soon as that happens, establish an executive level governance group, which will represent the different areas of the organization, and keep everyone in the organization up to date on where you are headed.
