Know Your Data and How You’ll Use It

Many healthcare organizations are taking a fresh look at their data, hoping to exploit it better for both clinical outcomes and operations. To the experts at Clearsense, the problems are not so much the shortage of data experts or lack of motivation, but rushing to use data without preparing it adequately or knowing what your business needs are.

Charles Boicey, Chief Innovation Officer at Clearsense, calls on organizations to base decisions not just on traditional clinical data, but “everything that puts out a signal within the health care organization,” including devices, information from the home, and even social media.

But as Kreg Hall, Chief Data Officer, says, the variety of such data makes it complex and therefore hard to integrate. He recommends, “Get the data into a streamlined, data-driven framework.”

All three managers interviewed in the video below stress the importance of preparing data (also known as curation) before trying to use it. Furthermore, all data sources must be integrated so they can be shared and fed into analytics that combine data from many sources. Making data interoperable in this way, according to Chief Technology Officer Randy Fusco, is “table stakes”: In other words, don’t even start creating dashboards or analytical reports without making the data work together.

Hall also emphasizes starting with business needs and use cases. You should use just the data you need to solve each problem. Boicey cites examples of practical applications for data: pulling information about thousands of patients to predict who might have sepsis, and determining what stage of heart failure a patient is in.

Watch the video to get insights into improving outcomes and reducing costs, creating real-time information systems that scale well, the need for more investments in security, putting the patient at the center of the care team, the role of data in telemedicine, building trust in data among clinicians, and analytics as an “intelligent assist.”

Learn more about Clearsense: https://clearsense.com/

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About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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