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In a recent article released by IBM, an argument is made for a transition in the U.S. healthcare system to a team-based approach based on the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model. A strong case is made from a description of the model, its’ players, technology, and benefits. The critical change that must be established first, though, is the healthcare systems’ evolution to a data-driven system. The access to, higher quality and integration of data, across disparate silos of information, will provide the foundation for this change. Only then can the position of Dr. Douglas Henley, EVP and CEO of the American Academy of Family Physicians, “ A smarter health system is one based in comprehensive patient centered primary care which improves patient/physician communication, the coordination and integration of care, and the quality and cost efficiency of care” be achieved.
The quality and cost of care is what we hear the most about in news headlines. However, the success of each piece of Dr. Henley’s statement is based on the ability of a team of providers to access accurate and updated patient data across care settings and over time in order to proactively suggest lifestyle improvements and reactively diagnose and recommend appropriate treatments. Fundamentally, each decision maker and operating entity needs a data strategy for how it will achieve the ambitious and often ambiguous goals it likes to claim.
I’ll recite a popular management mantra I’ve heard numerous times, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The healthcare system is a data rich environment. Cleaning, manipulating, and leveraging the huge volume of data available will become the critical success factors that will enable the linkage between education, research, the delivery of care and its outcomes, to benchmark and monitor the performance of the continuous improvements necessary to bring costs down and quality up.
Players in the healthcare world will soon find out (if they haven’t already) a principle all those in the data world already know:
- Good data, appropriately aggregated and manipulated, drives accurate information;
- Accurate information is not a luxury that most decision makers have;
- The executives, managers, physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, educators, pharmacists, researchers, and other stakeholders that do have access to accurate information are in a position to leverage and evolve this data and information from satisfying compliance and regulatory requirements to enabling an organizational knowledge-based asset.
Actionable data will drive the improvements that you see scattered across headlines and mentioned in political speeches in the past and no doubt, in the future.
Image courtesy of Texas Family Physician
Pablo Picasso once said “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” The truth is that computers have to work very hard to provide answers to what appear to be simple questions. While we are buried in terabytes, petabytes and exobytes of data – answers and information can be very hard to come by, especially information necessary for serious business decisions. Data must be viewed in context of a subject area to become information, and analytic techniques must be applied to information in order to create knowledge worthy of taking action. The challenge is getting data into context within a subject area and applying the right analytic techniques to get “real” answers.
Enter Wolfram Alpha, as an “answer” engine. Once touted as the next generation of search engine, this web application combines free form natural language input, i.e. simple questions, and dynamically computed results. Behind the scenes, a series of supercomputers provide linguistic analysis (context for both the question and the answer), ten terabytes of curated data that is constantly being updated, dynamic computation using 50,000 types of algorithms and equations, and computed presentation with 5,000+ types of visual and tabular output. Sound impressive? It could easily be a glimpse of the next generation of business intelligence and decision-support systems.
Wolfram Alpha lets you input a query that requires data analysis or computation, and it delivers the results for you. It’s “curated” data is specially prepared for computation— data that’s been hand-selected by experts working with Wolfram, who go through steps to make sure the raw data is tagged semantically and is presented unambiguously and precisely enough that it can be used for accurate computation. Alpha demonstrates the real power of metadata – data about data, and the importance of semantic tags for categorizing data into a context necessary for providing knowledge and, thus, answers.
Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine according to Wolfram Research co-founder Theodore Grey. It is not a replacement for Google. He says that Alpha is very, very different from a search engine. “Search engines are like reference librarians,” Grey explained. “Reference librarians are good at finding the book you might need, but they’re useless at interpreting the information for you.” Alpha takes reams of raw information and performs computations using those data. It produces pages of new information that have never existed on the Internet. “Search engines can’t find an answer for you that a Web page doesn’t have,” Grey explained.
“It’s been a dream of many people for a long time to have a computer that can answer questions,” said Grey. “A lot of people may think of a search engine as that, but if you think about it, what search engines do is an extreme limited subset of that sort of thing.” Examples of how Alpha can be used today range from solving difficult math equations to doing genetic analysis, examining the historic earnings of public companies, comparing the gross domestic products of different countries, even measuring the caloric content of a meal you plan to make. You can find out what day of the week it was on your birthday, or show the average temperature in your area going back days, months or years.
Wolfram Alpha would make an “ultimate” business intelligence application by computing over an enterprise data warehouse once the data was properly “curated.” The ability to create knowledge from data, particularly to create actionable answers is what business executives really expect – not prettier presentations. The only questions left for Alpha are:
- who can curate your data for you, and
- how quick can you see Alpha running over your data?
Image courtesy of BusinessWeek 9/25/08: "AmerisourceBergen's Scrimp-and-Save Dave"
The financial panic of late has caused a lot of attention on cutting costs – from frivolities like pens at customer service counters to headcount – organizations are slowing spending. Bad times force management to review every expense, and in these times obsess with them. Financial peace however has two sides – expense and revenue.
A side effect of cost cutting can be stunted revenue, over both the short and long terms. It is easier to evaluate costs than to uncover revenue opportunities, such as determining truly profitable offerings and adapting your strategies to maximize sales. Also as difficult to quantify are the true loses in unprofitable transactions, and competitive strategies that can negatively impact your competition.
The answers to many of these questions can be unearthed from data scattered around an organization, groking customers and instantly shared knowledge between disciplines. For example, by combining:
- customer survey data;
- external observations;
- clues left on web visits;
- and other correspondence within the corporation;
…an organization can uncover unmet needs to satisfy before the competition, and at reduced investment cost.
When external factors, like a gloomy job outlook, cause customers to change behavior, it is time to use all information at your disposal. Those prospects changing preferences for your offerings can provide golden intelligence about the competition or unmet needs.
Pumping information like this is the heart of business intelligence. Marketing and Sales can uncover the opportunity; however, it is up to the enterprise to determine how to execute a timely offering. Financials, human capital planning, and operations, work in concert to develop the strategy which requires forecasting data, operational statistics and capacity planning data to line up.
The Holidays are a great for watching “End of the World” shows on the History Channel. They were a great comfort, actually almost encouraging, because all of the prophecies target 2012. “The Bible Code II”, “The Mayan Prophecies”, and the Big 2012 Special compendium of End of the World scenarios, covering Nostrodamus to obscure German prophets, all agree that 2012 is the big one (Dec 21 to be exact!) What a relief!, the rest of the news reports are trending to canned goods, shotguns, and gold by the end of the year. We really have almost a whole 48 months before everything goes bang (I wasn’t ready anyway, procrastination rules!).
Unfortunately, we need to do some IT planning and budgeting for the new year and probably should have some thoughts going out 36 months (after that see the first paragraph). As I discussed in a prior blog, the reporting, BI/CPM/EPM, and analytics efforts are the strongest priority; followed by rational short cost savings efforts. All organizations must see where they are heading and keep as much water bailed out of the corporate boat as possible. Easy call, job done!
Then again a horrifying thought occurred to me, what if one of these initiatives should fail? (see my nightmares in prior blog posts on Data and Analytics). I am not saying I’m the Mad Hatter and the CEO is the Red Queen, but my head is feeling a bit loosely attached at the moment. Management cannot afford a failed project in this environment and neither can the CIO in any company (remember CIO=Career Is Over).
The best way to ensure sucessful project delivery (and guarantee my ringside lawn chair and six-pack at Armageddon in 2012) lies in building on best practice and solid technical architecture. For example, the most effective architecture is to use a layer of indirection between the CPM application (like Planning & Budgeting) and the source data systems (ERP, Custom transactional). This layer of indirection would be for data staging, allowing transfer to and from fixed layouts for simplified initial installation and maintenance. In addition, this staging area would be used for data cleansing and rationalization operations to prevent polluting CPM cubes with uncontrolled errors and changes. In terms of best practice, libraries and tools should be used in all circumstances to encapsulate knowlege rather than custom procedures or manual operations. Another best practice is to get procedural control of the Excel and Access jungle of wild and wooley data which stands ready to crash any implementation and cause failure and embarassment to the IT staff (and former CIO). When systems fail, it is usually a failure of confidence in the validity or timeliness of the information whether presented by dashboard or simple report.
CPM, EPM, and Analytics comprise and convey incredibly refined information and decisions of significant consequence are being made within organizations to restructure and invest based on this information. The information and decisions are only as good as the underlying data going into them. So skimping on the proper implementation can put the CIO’s paycheck at serious risk (Ouch!).
The current business environment reminds me of being socked in a fog bank in minutes, after being on a pleasant summer sail. The entire episode puts the pucker factor meter in the red zone. One minute clear sun and nice breeze, the next you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Your other senses become more acute — suddenly you hear the splash of the waves on the rocks you cannot see (funny I didn’t hear that a minute ago). The engines of power boats are closer, seeming to come at your every quarter (PT109 how bad can it be?).
As you sit in the cockpit with your canned air fog horn and US Coast Guard approved paddle, you think that the portable marine radio you bought will not save your sorry carcass (at least you can get the Coast Guard to retrieve your drowned body as you go down). You kick yourself for not buying that radar instead of the case of wine as a boating accessory (in fact, you think of downing some of that right now to ease your passing). What you would not give for just a little visibility.
That’s what running a business feels like right now (makes you want to puke doesn’t it, what fun). My Kingdom for some Visibility! Sure, you can see what the others are doing; cut a few heads there, shut a facility there. Is that the right thing to do? Are you killing your future seed corn or bailing the water which will sink the company? Ugh! In this case, you really wish your company’s reporting could be that radar to tell where and where not to go (sure wish I got that CPM Package rather than that Sales meeting in Napa Valley). With dashboards, planning and budgeting, consolidation, and operational BI, I would have a much better sense of what to feed and what to kill to take advantage of my competitors coming out of this economic fog (Aye Captain! in the Bay of the Blind the One Eyed Man is Admiral!). Wishing and regrets won’t get you much, and capital investment at this point seems to be a dirty word (Yep, there it is on George Carlin’s list).
In the case of my sailing experience, the way I dug out of the fog and fear was to dig out the depth finder the former owner left behind and the charts I bought because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I then proceeded to steer the sailboat in circles matching the readings on the depth finder with the depth readings on the chart based on my dead reckoning of my location (you reckon wrong, you’re dead). Needless to say it worked, the fog cleared, and I was within a quarter mile of where I should have been (Cool!). Just straightening out existing corporate reports and cleaning existing data is the equivalent of using the depth finder and charts already on hand (Yes! I know the difference between capital and expense). In fact, that effort usually saves money by eliminating old unused reports (Oh, I feel so green!).
In any case, take a solid first step by getting those state-of-the-art visibility tools of BI/CPM/EPM when the current problems clear or things become so dire as to require dry dock repairs. That way, the pucker meter won’t be buried in the red the next time this happens, and it will.
Image courtesy of Herbert Knosowski, AP
