Article by Roberta Katz, Director, Dell EMC Global Solutions, Healthcare – Life Sciences
We are all part of the ‘Information Generation’, a growing community of digital citizens that puts the world’s information at our fingertips. As both patients and consumers of healthcare information, our expectations for preventative care and wellness, diagnosis speed and treatment and disease management are changing.
With these new possibilities, come new opportunities to close the gap between the promise and reality of big data analytics to increase efficiencies, improve patient-provider collaboration, and enable data-driven decisions.
According to a research by Dell Technologies, only 37% of the public healthcare sector is embracing the new digital wave.
Yet evolving trends for digital transformation come at a time when healthcare organisations are already facing challenges to optimise their Electronic Health Record (EHR) and make the transition to value-based care reimbursement models.
To succeed in this new accountable care environment, health IT will need to bring data, applications and analytics together in a meaningful way using the next generation of predictive and prescriptive analytics technologies. Patients as consumers – empowered patients – are also asking for faster access to services, personalised experiences, 24/7 access and connectivity and access on more devices. In order for hospitals and health systems to adopt this digital mindset enterprise-wide, healthcare leaders say they will need to deliver against these five top business imperatives:
• Predictively spot new opportunities – population health management, value-based care, patient-centred medical home
• Demonstrate transparency and trust – treatment options and success rates, access to secure medical records
• Innovate in an agile way – clinical research, clinical integration, Internet of Things (IoT)
• Deliver unique, personalised experiences – 360 patient view, wearables, genomics, precision medicine
• Be always-on, operating in real time – telemedicine, mHealth, medication adherence
To embrace these business imperatives, healthcare leaders will need to use information in new ways – where the collection, analysis and capitalisation of data becomes a core component of their business strategy.
Healthcare providers need improved analytics capabilities to translate data into actionable insights to make informed decisions around business performance, patient engagement and innovation.
But, today’s traditional IT infrastructures often lack the scalability, performance and analytic capability to support the business strategy and to make timely and targeted care interventions at the point of care. How do healthcare organisations take analytics to the next level to achieve organisational goals for operational efficiencies, predictive care, clinical research and population health management? Data lakes.
A data lake provides a powerful data architecture with a unified location to help reduce silos across the healthcare enterprise. Data can also be connected from trusted outside sources including payers, genomic research centres, public health databases, biobanks and social media feeds.
The data lake allows for effective cross data analysis and incorporates all internal data sources and trusted external sources for mining and analysis by clinical departments, business analysts and data science teams. With such future-focused insights, healthcare providers can further advance accountable care initiatives, creating a new realm of data science for uncovering trends, patterns, relationships, correlations and discoveries that can impact integrated patient care.
Data lakes also open up possibilities for integrating information from wearables, fitness devices and appliances built on the Internet of Things (IoT) such as heart monitoring implants, for personalised, real-time care delivery. Caregivers can employ advanced analytics to use data generated by these devices to help reduce in-hospital complications and unnecessary readmissions, deliver personalised medicine, identify genetic markers, improve clinical trial safety and much more.
This flexible and reliable platform offers a myriad of new opportunities to find trends and correlations, helping providers to create a data-driven, continuous learning environment. Data lake platforms provide massive scalability, simple management, and operational flexibility – and can be expanded beyond the core data centre experience to extend aggregation and accessibility benefits to both the edge and cloud.
Traditionally, healthcare providers have invested substantial time and effort into extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) data from its original format into data warehouses purpose-built for historical business intelligence.
Adopting a data lake strategy builds on current investments for business intelligence and helps simplify storage, management, and analysis of big data through integration of data in real-time, near real-time, or in batch from disparate sources – without impacting day-to-day operations or access to data. Analytics can now become forward-looking and predictive and complement the business intelligence rear-view mirror.
Moving forward, the use of advanced analytics for next-generation care delivery will become a key differentiator for healthcare providers in this highly competitive marketplace – particularly with the demands of the Information Generation. Transforming into an information-driven and data-focused organisation will be critical to achieve and maintain competitive advantage.
Ultimately, a data lake helps healthcare organisations run their operations as a business. Real-time insights and predictive models mean fewer complications, fewer unnecessary emergency room interventions and higher levels of wellness across the population – all at a reduced cost.
