It's the Data, Stupid!

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“It’s the economy, stupid” is a phrase that can be traced back to James Carville, who was a strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential bid. The story goes that Carville pasted signs on the campaign’s office walls.  If Mr. Carville were a strategist in the healthcare industry, it is likely he would coin the phrase, “It’s the data, stupid!” 

With all the healthcare technology companies providing data storage, workflow automation, archiving, security, telehealth solutions, etc., companies are focusing more and more on how to leverage and monetize the data in their possession. In this age of analytics, population health, value-based healthcare/risk agreements, precision medicine, genomics, and so forth, health systems are investing in making data available, actionable, and shareable.  Case in point, look at these recent headlines alone: 

“Instead of just farming off all our data to a technology company somewhere, we’ve formed our own,” said Rod Hochman, chief executive of Providence. The hospital systems will focus on research questions around health equity, as well as improving medical treatment, he said.

 

With this acquisition, Cerner plans to harness data to improve the safety, efficiency and efficacy of clinical research across life sciences, pharmaceuticals and health care at large, the company said in a press release. The health IT company is looking to create a leading data insights and clinical research platform.

 

The acquisition will merge Change Healthcare with Optum to offer software, data analytics and other services to healthcare clients.

The advancements in science and health information technology are driving the value of possessing and harnessing historical data that is accessible and actionable for many organizations across the healthcare industry.  Large health systems are selling their accumulated patient data (with PHI redacted, of course) to research and analytics firms. 

And as the race to cure cancer continues, opportunities abound that are only made possible by mining big data, including advances in precision medicine that have already led to new discoveries and several new treatments that are tailored to an individual's specific characteristics, such as one's genetic makeup or the genetic profile of an individual tumor.

Big data is allowing quicker and more effective development of the latest vaccines and drugs.  PEX Network outlines these 6 Ways Pharmaceutical Companies are Using Data Analytics to Drive Innovation & Value:

#1: Accelerate drug discovery and development

#2: Optimize and improve the efficacy of clinical trials

#3: Target specific patient populations more effectively

#4: Better insight into patient behaviour to improve drug delivery and effectiveness and healthcare outcomes

#5: Improve safety and risk management

#6: Gain improved insight into marketing and sales performance

The more historical and clinical trial data these research, pharma, and analytics companies have access to, the faster they can bring more effective solutions to the market and generate revenue.

The same can be said for a health system’s information governance and eDiscovery programs where fast, high-performing data analytics can substantially reduce the time and cost of preparing for a case and empowers an organization to identify, collect, index, and analyze big data.  It is the review stage in eDiscovery that is extremely time-consuming, especially if a human eye needs to review each document. Technology used to analyze big data can drastically reduce the time and money needed.

Another example of monetizing data is negotiating risk agreements. Healthcare providers without comprehensive data analytics solutions to leverage information are at a disadvantage when it comes to negotiating the best contractual terms with payers in the flourishing value-based care marketplace.

In CIO, Paddy Padmanabhan’s article, The new innovation model: monetizing healthcare data, he discusses how healthcare innovators and healthcare enterprises alike are realizing the competitive advantages they can gain with the data aggregation and monetization in healthcare.  Mr. Padmanabhan lays out 3 primary benefactors of the monetization of patient data:

  1. Healthcare enterprises, looking to augment revenue streams, benefit from offering their datasets for hire.

  2. Digital health innovators and startups that partner with a health plan or health system for access to data and a real-world environment are able to accelerate product development.

  3. Healthcare consumers, whose data is powering these new business models, will indirectly benefit through better quality and lower costs of care.

However, one obstacle to accessing, sharing, and selling patient data is unstructured historical patient charts stored as PDFs in the DMS or even as paper in a file room.  Imagine being able to unleash this valuable asset by automatically abstracting discrete patient data and delivering it to any database system where it immediately becomes actionable.  Extract’s LabDE software has been freeing patient data trapped on paper or in PDFs for over seven years. The alternative is to have large teams of data abstractors performing this task manually.

Finally, as it relates to the sharing and monetizing of data, Mr. Padmanabhan closes with a clever analogy, “For now, Murphy’s Golden Rule applies: whoever has the gold, makes the rules. The metaphorical gold in question is healthcare data.”

 

References:

CIO: https://www.cio.com/article/3433158/the-new-innovation-model-monetizing-healthcare-data.html

FindLaw: https://technology.findlaw.com/electronic-discovery/what-does-big-data-means-in-terms-of-ediscovery-.html

Beckers: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/the-advantage-of-data-analytics-when-negotiating-value-based-contract-terms-with-payers.html

Businesswire: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200511005815/en/How-Big-Data-Analytics-in-Clinical-Trial-is-Changing-the-Dynamics-of-Pharma-Industry-Quantzig

PEX Network:  https://www.iqpc.com/media/1001534/35903.pdf


About the Author: Eric Olson

Eric is a Regional Business Development Manager at Extract Systems with more than 10 years of experience in the healthcare technology marketplace. His healthcare background includes data backup, disaster recovery, SaaS, value-based care, HIM process improvement, regulatory guidelines, and quality analytics. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY and enjoys hiking and camping in our national parks. Eric engages and challenges his customers to find ways of leveraging technology to streamline workflows, improve processes and ultimately reduce costs. Eric is committed to being accountable and responsive to his customers, focusing on developing long-term relationships because he understands that his customers are buying from him as much as they are buying from Extract Systems.