A new breed of enthusiastic tech users
Whether you agree that data is the “new oil” or not, there’s no escaping the fact that it is crucial to healthcare success today. The good news is that there is more data than ever before. As a result of this year’s pandemic, the digital transformation of healthcare has been accelerated. There has been a paradigm shift in the perception of technology across the health and care sectors in the UK. Technology provided the answer to many of the urgent questions the pandemic asked; and faced with the unprecedented crisis, rules were relaxed, funding increased, and decisions made quickly. Deployments and developments that would normally have taken months or years, took days or weeks.
Where tech proved its worth health and care professionals (who had often been portrayed as sceptical of technology in the past) became enthusiastic tech users, increasingly demanding data on which to base decisions. There can surely be no going back.
Data, and the insights that can be derived from it, gives healthcare organisations the ability to transform their services and the way they operate. Making staff more efficient and able to better care for patients. By applying state-of the-art analytics to the data being collected day-in-day-out, evidence-based decisions can be made. These improve both the efficiency and quality of services delivered, while encouraging a helicopter view of the organisation rather than the traditional siloed approach. Predictive, preventative decision making can also become reality.
Allowing data-driven insights
There are multiple areas where data analytics can be invaluable. But how do healthcare organisations tap into the value of their data? It’s important to consider how the data is currently stored. Is the data siloed or is there one single point of truth? Who needs to access it? Does it need to be accessed remotely when doing home visits? Will locating the data centrally actually help? What standardisation is needed to create a single point of truth? How will central data locations improve their business decisions?
Now that a cloud first strategy is being adopted by most local healthcare authorities, solutions are increasingly being devised and created in the cloud. And for good reason. The cloud enables existing disparate data sets to be funnelled and orchestrated into effective data analytics platforms that allows for data-driven insights. Only once you’ve got your data to the point where it’s migrated, orchestrated, cleansed, transformed and relocated can true business intelligence commence.
What’s more, this intelligence can unlock strategies that can be reused and shared across different healthcare authorities. A modern cloud-based platform converts data into information and makes it readily available for analytical workloads and strong predictive outcomes. This provides opportunities to train the datasets and information stored in the Data Platform by applying machine learning and data science techniques
The crucial element with data analytics within all areas of healthcare is allying deep sector knowledge with broad functional capabilities and a high degree of technical sophistication. The data is all there. It just needs to be channelled, ingested and orchestrated to a central repository where it can be used intelligently.
Who knows the data best?
Whilst they may be working in different teams throughout the organisation, those that are using the data week in, week out, know it the best. However, only by driving understanding through a clear data strategy of what can be shared and what can be distributed out from a central location, can the teams unlock the full potential of that data.
The truth is that most healthcare organisations have business intelligence departments already. The issue is that they all work from siloed data and from numerous applications that have been added one by one over the years.
A vision of the future
The data of today comes in multiple formats, most notably structured or unstructured. That’s why data strategies need to create a central repository, underpinned by cloud technology, where data can be ingested at speed. It also needs to involve collaboration internally, which allows the solution to be fully embraced. From that central point, insight can be built up using algorithms to train the data, generating prescriptive outcomes, or predictive analysis using new business intelligence tool sets.
It’s about unlocking the potential. This fundamentally starts with not being scared and feeding those data sources into an environment that gives the business intelligence teams, together with the data analysts, to make the most of the data. It also gives them the opportunity to plug in new cognitive machine learning services, that further empowers the data analysts to show the senior leadership teams their vision of the future. Only once you get to this point can the sheer power of data – and specifically data analytics – be truly transformative.
Article by Dan Thompson, Head of Data Services and Engineering, Agilisys