How High-Performing Teams Advance Healthcare Analytics Capabilities

August 22, 2022 - The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation across the healthcare system. Moreover, the pace of change is pushing healthcare organizations to drive further clinical innovation through the increased use of analytics.

The pressure is on a limited pool of IT personnel to balance support for day-to-day operations and focus on developing data analytics capabilities to benefit the overall organization. With workforce shortages hitting the healthcare industry, providers must approach their data analytics projects with care, increasingly looking outside their organizations for resources and expertise that can enable their organizations to meet with success.

“The analytics technology landscape has become extraordinarily heterogeneous. We are dealing with a problem of choice, and there are so many choices. It is almost impossible for an organization to have all the relevant skills and hire them, groom them, skill them, and train them internally,” says Kumar Kolin, Chief Technology Officer of Emids.

“Additionally, large initiatives always require surge capacity that is unavailable internally to many organizations, and they are unlikely skilled in leveraging globally distributed models due to their regional nature and footprint. To take full advantage of both talent availability and economics, they do have to rely on a strategic partner.”

Creating high-performing teams

Supporting successful healthcare data analytics projects requires a diversity of expertise, from clinical to technological. Unfortunately, with healthcare organizations under immense strain, bringing together the right mix of personnel can prove challenging, if not impossible.

 That is where leveraging a strategic partner well versed in the design and engineering of health technology can improve care delivery outcomes, while the further utilization of data management can provide additional tremendous value.

“The most important part of a high-performing team is its makeup of individuals who can cover all the dimensions of a project and understand the industry and needs of our client,” Kolin explains. “The composition and time zone of the team must also meet a healthcare organization’s preference for certain levels of interaction. Obviously, we are in a globally distributed environment, but you want to ensure the right balance of talent availability and cost.”

According to Kolin, selecting the right members of a high-performing team must be complemented by rigorous and thorough assessments of its makeup.

“Sometimes a team is lopsided in one direction or another, so rebalancing some team members is necessary to ensure the proper composition. Doing so allows work to be distributed based on the strength and the capability of the overall team,” he adds.

Properly targeting innovation

Given the historically siloed nature of healthcare, few organizations have insights beyond their four walls. Even then, healthcare organizations might lack a clear picture of the opportunities enabled by their current data. A fresh set of eyes can avoid wasted resources and effort.

“Sometimes organizations are unaware of the data they possess,” Kolin warns. “Before spending several million dollars trying to build something, a data science exploration team can mine their data to identify ways to extract value, an important aspect that sometimes people miss.”

Data provides the foundation for healthcare analytics. But numerous obstacles stand in the way of leveraging clinical data.

One is the matter of privacy and security. In the context of healthcare where HIPAA governs permitted uses of protected health and personally identifiable information, a strategic partner able to provide obfuscation capabilities allows for the de-identification and anonymization of this data that allows high-performing team members outside the organization to work with this essential material.

Another obstacle comes in the form of repeatable input variables for testing. “One of the biggest bottlenecks is test data. The quality of any analytics product depends significantly on the availability of a robust data set,” Kolin maintains, noting that teams focused on synthetic test data have become critical to data analytics projects.

Additional specialized teams can provide expertise to improve the user experience. Data visualization is key to ensuring that end-users are able to process data, creating a narrative to translate information into action.

The urgency of now

The healthcare industry is known to be a slow adopter of digital innovation. Still, specific market forces should compel providers to move quickly to develop and implement data analytics solutions to optimize patient care and ensure optimal outcomes.

“The good news for the laggards is that big data and data analytics projects no longer cost millions of dollars to complete,” says Kolin. “Given the availability of technology, particularly the maturity of cloud storage and computing, organizations do not need to invest millions of dollars in infrastructure.”

What’s more, healthcare organizations have an opportunity to build on lessons learned from expensive data analytics projects across the industry and avoid those mistakes.

“They should look at this through the lens that they are in the unique position to learn from the billions of dollars that have been spent in this area while benefitting from the fact that solutions to big data problems are available at a tenth of the cost from even three years ago,” Kolin concludes.

Providers have a unique opportunity to develop and scale their data analytics capabilities, with technology and infrastructure no longer proving cost prohibitive. However, a skilled workforce is in high demand, and successful data analytics projects require the right mixture of people, data, and technology. By working with a strategic partner, healthcare organizations can create well-rounded, high-performance teams to complete projects efficiently and effectively the first time. With the healthcare industry looking to pay providers based on quality rather than quantity of care, hospitals, health systems, and physician practices need to ensure the data analytics capabilities support care innovation and improved outcomes.

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About Emids

Founded in 1999 and based in Nashville, Emids provides global digital transformation solutions across the healthcare ecosystem, providing tailored, cutting-edge solutions and services in the domains of engineering, design, and system management for payers, providers, biopharma, medical technology and healthcare technology firms. Emids’ core values as trusted guides and inclusive innovators obsessed with delivering impact and value for its customers are the cornerstones of its singular mission of advancing the future of health through impactful technology solutions. Learn more at www.emids.com.