Transforming Healthcare Analytics

CHAPTER 5Unifying People, Process, and Technology

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

— Steve Jobs

In order for an organization to be a leader in analytic maturity and create a competitive advantage, you need to develop an analytics strategy. An organization cannot just throw technology at the problem and expect to “win.” It should be a strategy around four pillars. The pillars are around data, people, process, and technology and we covered each of these pillars in the previous chapters. Each one of these pillars will play a crucial role when executing your strategy. The order in which you address each of these pillars is based on your organization and the support you have from senior executives. Ultimate success is executing on all four pillars and is a journey which may take years to complete.

In the 2000s, healthcare work was usually completed in siloes. Figure 5.1 shows the traditional silos or domains organizations typically worked in, and healthcare institutions are no exception. The operational silo is where business intelligence usually existed. They were responsible for data mining, querying, reporting, delivering decision-making dashboards around various business needs, from utilization and scheduling to throughput and productivity. The clinical silo housed caring for the patient, from personalized medicine to chronic disease management to clinical risk stratification. The financial ...