Across every industry from financial services to healthcare, companies are creating, storing, analyzing, and leveraging data more than ever before to combat fraud, find new cures to deadly diseases, and automate entire industries with data-powered artificial intelligence and machine learning robotics. Modern data integration, data quality, and data engineering technologies have made it easier than... more
Data. Governance. Two words. Fourteen letters. Loaded with history and pain. The label “data governance” carries with it a lot of baggage in healthcare organizations. Most agree that healthcare data is poorly understood and inadequately documented, and that the resulting reporting and analysis is unreliable and can’t be trusted. This causes frustration among managers and... more
I recently had conversations with several data governance leaders who expressed concerns related to the scope of work involved in launching a data governance program. There are plenty of books and white papers promoting examples of robust programs with huge teams. And plenty of technology vendors, anxious to impress, tout the robust features available to solve... more
The last few years have seen enterprise data governance as a top data management priority for healthcare organizations. And data governance has become more critical specifically for provider organizations with the COVID-19 crisis as new sources of data proliferate, the scope of self-service analytics expands dramatically, and executive decision-making evolves overnight to rely on reporting... more
We hear every day from virtually every one of our hospital customers and prospects that “If it’s not COVID related, we’re not doing it.” This is an understandable response when confronted by a crisis like we have never seen before. Healthcare providers are seeing massive decreases in revenue as they suspend elective procedures and routine... more
We’ve all heard the cautionary tale across healthcare (and beyond) that poorly deployed cloud data lakes run the risk of becoming data swamps, where untrusted volumes of data deliver limited-to-no value or insights to the organization. This is not a myth. While most healthcare organizations, providers, and payers have embraced the need to deliver real-time,... more
We are all familiar with the endless and repetitive paperwork required at each doctor’s office visit. We complete them as quickly as possible and check the boxes with often just a brief scan. However, those little check boxes on the forms are about to play a much bigger role in how payer and provider organizations,... more
Interoperability and the right to share patient and member data between healthcare organizations—and between healthcare organizations and third-party application developers—is long overdue and desperately needed. Much as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act—enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—and meaningful use broke through decades of... more
I went to my first HIMSS conference in 1996. At that time, every doctor with a garage and a good idea had built an EHR and was exhibiting at HIMSS. You walked the floor, and it was huge then, but small compared to today’s health IT conference. Some of my Informatica colleagues had already been... more
I spend much of my time meeting with healthcare executives and discussing how they can transform their organizations using data. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these discussions often start with a focus on the discrete data captured in electronic health records or the codified content of claims and other transaction applications for payers. However, focusing on just the... more