The Healthcare Data Desert

You may have heard about “data lakes”, the vast pools of data that many organizations are building to store, manage and analyze their ever-growing repositories of structured and unstructured data. While I applaud these efforts, it begs the question – What do you call the opposite? How do we name the situations where data is difficult or impossible to access?  I call these data deserts. Today, I want to discuss the healthcare data desert that we all live in and how we can escape.  

In the healthcare data desert, information is as plentiful as grains of sand, but useful insight is absent. Consider this the next time you visit your doctor and they hand you a folder filled with paper for your next doctor’s appointment. Another excellent example of life in the data desert is a faxed medical record or annual health assessment.  A deep, rich and immensely useful treasure trove of data exists in these documents, but the data is virtually unusable in its analog form. If those documents were digital data, they could be scoured by sophisticated algorithms to provide insight into our health. Today, most of that data slips through the cracks in the system like grains of desert sand. Why? Because data locked in documents is considered too expensive to be extracted from scanned paper, faxes and PDFs.

Who cares? We all should. It affects our health and our wallets. In order to improve both we need to break free of the analog world. Said another way, healthcare organizations need to live in a world of data and automated digital processes, but instead are left to meander aimlessly in a data-parched desert landscape filled with postal mail, faxes and PDFs. 

Data, Data Everywhere, and not a drop to drink?

In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge a thirsty sailor on a ship is surrounded by salt water that he cannot drink. He proclaims, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” Health business executives share a similar experience and could similarly shout “Data, data everywhere, but mostly in a form that stinks.” Data is indeed everywhere, but because it is in the wrong form, it remains in the data desert. We need data, but we get documents. 

Three Lessons on Escaping in a Healthcare Data Desert

What lessons have I learned in my 25 years focused on the problem documents and data in healthcare?  Here are some thoughts to ruminate on:

1. Solutions over software. I have had the opportunity to interact with software companies now for over 30 years.  I have learned that most are trying to solve their quarterly revenue problems, not your data or process problems. For too many, it is okay to round the corners of the truth, tell part of the story and simply give a good demo (See my previous post “A Demo and A Prayer”). I have learned that software is not THE solution. It is a single technology component that can only solve problems when combined with subject matter experts (people) and a deep understanding of process transformation (Process and Change Management). At BRYJ we work with several software products that turn documents into data and transform healthcare processes. They can be an excellent part of a complete solution, but only when you have a clear understanding of what role they play in the overall solution. 
2. Truth is about complete and accurate data. Your GPS only gets you where you want to go because it has verified, accurate and complete data about streets and addresses. Your software only gets you where you want to go when the underlying data is equally complete and accurate. Unfortunately, healthcare data is often incomplete and imperfect. Like the examples mentioned above, data on forms, in medical records and sent via fax is often not turned into data.  This data is critical to complete data. We need the whole truth, not just part of it.  Getting to truth data often requires technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR – for handwritten documents) and Machine Learning/AI to that can capture all the data making it available for analysis and insight. But these technologies are only part of the solution. A guide is crucial.
3. You need a trusted guide. It is hard to make it out of the data desert without a guide. As mentioned above, for a successful solution you need people, process and technology. A key part of the “people” component is your guide. A guide is trustworthy, experienced and a deep subject matter expert on the topic of transitioning from analog to digital processes and in turning documents into data. Guides can help connect the dots between business, financial and technical goals. Guides can also help organizations extract maximum leverage from solutions to increase process velocity, improve customer delight and reduce costs. At BRYJ, we are often asked to be guides for our clients as they look to transform analog processes, turn documents into data and break free of the analog data desert.

Come out of the Desert!

What do you think? Is healthcare stuck in the sand due to analog processes and documents? If you feel like you have been living in the data desert for far too long and are looking for a guide that can help you select the right path to a data oasis, or if you simply have a comment, reach out to Mike Hurley at mike@bryjinc.com.