Mar 1, 2018
As patient data becomes more diverse and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning make analytics more intuitive, opportunities are growing for connecting disparate data throughout the healthcare industry and using it to make decisions, predict needs, identify risks, and strengthen trust and relationships with consumers.
In healthcare organizations, CIOs are leading these efforts. Forty percent of hospital CIOs are planning to launch an enterprise healthcare analytics platform this year, according to a Spok survey of members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). Elsewhere in the industry, CIOs are helping their organizations navigate the broad cultural changes required to integrate data-driven strategies into their day-to-day operations. Innovation and transformation around big data are key goals for more 80 percent of CIOs recently surveyed by Gartner.
While the potential for harnessing and analyzing patient data is unlimited, integrating it and its enabling technologies into the traditional models of healthcare organizations is a complex challenge fraught with obstacles that still must be overcome.
At our recent fourth annual emids Healthcare Summit held Nov. 8 in Nashville, Tennessee, we gathered CIOs from payer, provider, life sciences, healthcare technology and consumer health organizations for a roundtable discussion on the challenges and opportunities of leveraging the untapped potential of patient data and using it to create more value-rich experiences for consumers.
CIOs discussed the data landscape today and the barriers that prevent providers and payers from maximizing and sharing the data they have. Opening the data floodgates may expose organizations to more risk and revenue loss initially, panelists noted. But not taking advantage of the data at their fingertips will only keep organizations from moving forward and delivering the seamless, relevant experiences consumers demand, they agreed.
“This isn’t about data being our critical asset—it’s about innovating new experiences and coming up with transformational capabilities that will ultimately be good for all of us,” said Laurent Rotival, CIO of Cambria Health.
Download our CIO roundtable report, Healthcare CIOs Explore How Data Can Revolutionize the Consumer Experience, for more insights from this discussion.