A three-pronged analytics strategy

The Medical Informatics World Conference was a great source of knowledge from the field and those who have put analytics at the top of their IT priority list.

“You can build the best recommendation engine in the world and the best possible algorithm but if the company wasn’t ready to execute all that, it would all be for naught,” said Inderpal Bhandari, PhD, senior vice president and chief data officer at Cambia Health Solutions, a large nonprofit which is a conglomerate of 22 companies that reaches 100 million people. 

Thus, strategic alignment between the analytics department and the corporate strategy is critical. From there, a company can develop specific objectives, success metrics and performance metrics. “Then you have the whole organization pushing behind it, and that’s how you do it to scale.”

Bhandari advised the following three approaches to changing corporate culture, which entails “going from a data-as-a-byproduct culture to data-as-an-asset culture”:

• Top-down sponsorship, or executive support and buy in
• Bottom-up stewardship, meaning staff from all departments within a company “have to become stewards of the data"
• Governance to execute strategy

Finding the workforce to carry out analytics remains a challenge, as healthcare organizations often need individuals with mastery in three buckets of knowledge: data science, behavioral science and strategy.

“It’s hard to find talent that spans those three easily,” Bhandari said, adding that some institutions should structure an educational program to encompass all three areas.

Does your organization have an analytics strategy? Please share.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor