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5 Takeaways from Our Time with Jason Burke

May 10, 2019

In April of 2019, System VP and Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) Jason Burke of UNC Health Care visited Strata Decision Technology to speak as part of the Strata Speaker Series inviting industry leaders to present on their perceived “biggest problem” in healthcare.

In Mr. Burke’s presentation, he defined the evolving role of data management in healthcare and the rise of “big data.” The following are 5 key takeaways from the conversation:

  1. Data governance is needed to operationalize big data. In the 2000s, healthcare providers were the source of all healthcare data. The data matched operations and was largely obtained from their own systems. Today, an exponential growth in data sources has led to an increased need for data management—and to consider what we know because of our data, not just about the data.
  2. Garbage in, garbage out. While healthcare is starting to lean on other industries for new ways to drive efficiency, no amount of buzzwords or trendy technology (like text mining, AI, machine learning, etc.) can fix our problems if the process by which they’re being used is inefficient, unproductive, or counterintuitive to long-standing culture, people, and processes.
  3. Respect the culture. Any journey with analytics must respect the organization’s cultural norms and utilize them to build a model that appeals to the preexisting culture. Whether the organization struggles with bottlenecks or establishing a single source of truth for their data, their model will need to be designed with these things in mind.
  4. Harnessing big data is an organizational competency. Raw data is an important part of the equation, but the path to making a positive change and increasing value requires investing in people and process. It can’t just be a technology fix—leveraging “big data” requires investing in competencies like data governance, business operations, and engineering operations.
  5. “Big data” isn’t always “big insights.” Concerns of data use involve storage, structure, timeliness, validity, reliability, and even triage, but they don’t always lead to insights. In the way stand important issues, like innovation, health outcomes, profitability, customer intimacy, and even risk and value. Providers will need to consider carefully how they can create structures and data governance to enable teams across the organization to find insights from their data.