Data-Driven Healthcare: How Analytics and BI are Transforming the Industry

CHAPTER 7 Making Data Consumable

I am currently in information overload. I feel overwhelmed with the speed and volume of data that comes at me every day. I have always prided myself on being up to date on impactful news stories and a few other topics that I have found fascinating, but lately I find myself just not as interested or, worse, only interested in the sound bites. Depth of knowledge doesn't seem to be as important today as breadth.

I'm not the only one. It seems like the whole world is in information overload these days. Part of the problem is we have so much information coming at us we're not able to pay attention to the information that is important. In order to become a data-driven healthcare organization (DDHO), we have to find a way to make sure that we provide the opportunities to present data so that our end users, from doctor to patient, know what's important and can take action on those few pieces of information.

Knowing what to pay attention to takes more focus than it should. The influx of “dashboards” into business intelligence (BI) initially offered an elegant way to visualize a lot of data quickly. As the pendulum swung the other way, we dashboarded everything, so much so that it's become a verb. Software vendors quickly jumped on the visualization bandwagon, some of them taking the time to research and work with experts in the field, others just providing bar graphs and pie graphs and calling it good enough. In order to take advantage of these new capabilities, ...