Phoenix Children’s Hospital, meanwhile, uses data lakes to sift through patient information and improve in areas such as medication dosing.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to how or why organizations are taking advantage of data and analytics solutions.
Providers Build a Foundation for Data Success
Investing in a data strategy doesn’t just mean deploying solutions to process and visualize information, however. Building a proper foundation is critical to ensuring such efforts can even get off the ground.
At Sanford Health in Sioux Falls, S.D., a virtualization solution helped the organization create a virtual data warehouse that links together the system’s different applications.
And at StoneGate Senior Living — which operates senior care communities in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado —
an upgrade to its data center focused on hyperconvergence enables the organization to not only store more information but also to access it faster. That helps StoneGate improve the level of care it delivers to its patients and residents.
At HIMSS19 in Orlando, Fla., former National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. Karen DeSalvo, now a professor of medicine and population health at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, talked about how the industry is using data and analytics in smarter ways to produce better patient outcomes.
“We have spent the last seven or eight years building this foundation of data, and we’re living on a mountain of it,” she said. “Now we’re able to use that data to turn it into machine learning and artificial intelligence, tools that lower the cognitive burden for not only the caregivers and the clinical team but also for patients as they’re making choices in the healthcare system.”
Healthcare Data Will Only Grow in Importance
These trends will almost certainly persist as providers continue to prioritize data-driven planning. Increasingly, strategies that revolve around leveraging data and analytics capabilities will not only be beneficial but necessary to keep pace in a highly competitive healthcare landscape.
For healthcare organizations on the fence, there’s no time like the present to start planning for your future.
