Lacking financial resources is something that plagues most healthcare IT departments when it comes to analytics, particularly the advanced forms of prescriptive analytics.
The top three tactical challenges respondent organizations expect to face in performing analytics are the need to deliver timely analysis (46%), overcoming insufficient skills in analytics (42%), and insufficient funding in light of other priorities (37%), according to respondents in the 2017 HealthLeaders Media Analytics in Healthcare Survey.
Note that two of the top three tactical challenges are either indirectly or directly related to financial resources—the solution to overcoming insufficient skills in analytics is investment in training or adding new analytics staff, and insufficient funding in light of other priorities is clear-cut.
Delivering timely analysis is perhaps a universal problem—life as we know it requires a real-time response to information needs, and healthcare is no different.
The response for insufficient staff (35%) is fourth on the list of analytics challenges, which is also an indicator of insufficient financial resources.
Lacking financial resources is something that plagues most healthcare IT departments when it comes to analytics, particularly the advanced forms of prescriptive analytics—the needs almost always exceed the budget—because there is simply too much data and the complexity of analyzing it effectively can be overwhelming.
Steve Hess, chief information officer at UCHealth, an integrated health system serving the Colorado area that includes seven hospitals, 1,620 hospital beds, and more than 17,000 employees, says that outsourcing the more advanced parts of the analytics workload while retaining core EHR data responsibilities and mainstream analytics functions can be an effective strategy.
"About 18 months ago I made a decision that we can never find nor retain the data science experts that we're going to need in the future. So even though we're partners with the University of Colorado and we have really intelligent individuals in the Denver area, it is extremely difficult to attract and retain that level of expertise. That's why our partnerships are with companies that are in Silicon Valley and competing with Google and Microsoft and all these different global organizations, that's a better approach for us," he says.
"We have a talented, talented team that knows how to deconstruct the Epic data model really well, but we could never get to that next level that we're going to need to go to. I think you can count on one or two hands the number of healthcare organizations in this country that can actually do what we're talking about in terms of advanced analytics," says Hess.
Jonathan Bees is a research analyst for HealthLeaders.