"2013 Is the Year of Data": A PriceWaterhouseCoopers Executive Looks at the Top IT Challenges on the Horizon

Many hospital organizations lack interoperability and integration. Most have ERP [enterprise resource planning] -based data, and now they have an electronic medical record that gives them information about individual patients; but they lack the integrated data coming from both the financial and clinical arenas, to give them an integrated view. Because they’re often being asked to improve clinical quality to bring costs under control. And today, they don’t have integrated data and information systems. The percentage of patient care organizations with truly integrated data is very low. Often, they can present some very basic summary-view data, but people lack the detailed information to make this all real. I think that the systems that are actually prepared to be able to do this type of informational analysis are very low, because it’s taken all their smartest people to put their electronic medical records in place. So they took some of their brightest IT and clinical people in order to focus on getting the EMR right. And though they may have seen the reporting needs and the transformational models coming, they had to put their best, most talented people on the EMR implementation projects. And so the timeframe is very tight. But this is also very time-intensive.

In fact, they’re still very much focused on meaningful use, and that’s sucking up a lot of resources, right?

Exactly. We are finding a small number of organizations that are doing all those things, that are finding a way to be able to accomplish everything, but they’re a small minority, of course. But we’re seeing an increase in discussions around data governance, and greater understanding of data and how it needs to be integrated. And often, people have used similar or even the same terms for different phenomena. And this is very technical, but it also requires broader understandings of processes and of types of data. So we’ve an increased number of discussions around data governance, which is essential, because without that governance, you only get a lot of data. You need the business, clinical, and IT people to come together, and you need their time in order to make this happen.

And the additional challenge is that many of these initiatives require the obtaining of data from outside your system as well. And this makes you start to think about prioritizing these cases, and not trying to build it all at once, because it’s too big; but being very specific about analytic uses, so that you can create the data collection required to support the changing business needs. The good news is that the amount of data shouldn’t be mammoth; it should be very specific in focus. And you need to move to a prioritize-it-and-they-will-use-it mentality; because if you gain their buy-in, you have a much better chance of people using that data effectively. And going back to our top ten, it’s figuring out how to plan all this and get to agile, skilful use of data across those silos.

And what’s happened is that in some cases, the HIT implementation has resulted in new data and analytic capabilities. The reporting solution that might have come packaged with your electronic medical record might have pushed data into your data mart, and if you implement it and give people access to it, there are collections of data departmentally, but that process won’t have provided your organization with integrated information across the multiple data systems. And if you give people free access to large piles of data, you make the IT people wonder why they have access to that data, and what they’re doing with it. The reality is that many people have access to data in organizations; and you don’t always know how people are actually using the information. So it creates a different type of data governance and decision-making. Because we can’t turn everything off until we figure it all out at once.

But these new reporting capabilities exist, and they change what people could do with this information.

Per the report’s section on “BYOD” [bring your own device policies], do you have any thoughts?

Yes, 20 percent of breaches reported nationally were associated with BYOD situations. So it’s not an insignificant issue, and is worthy of some mention. But I think the bigger story in the paper really is the requirements around integrated analytics to drive so many different business purposes, and understanding that you can’t do everything at once, and that you have to prioritize. And data security policies naturally flow out of that. Because 2013 is the year of data, no longer the time of information systems—perhaps the year of integrated data. And I think within the year, you’ll see the leaders pull away significantly from the laggards in their use of data analytics.