CTG Health Solutions Releases White Paper Detailing Big Data Best Practices

Provides roadmap for converting Big Data into actionable data assets

CTG Health Solutions, (CTGHS) a leading health information technology (IT) consulting firm and a business unit of CTG, an IT solutions and services company, recently announced the availability of the white paper, "Big Data: Moving Beyond the Buzzword." The white paper outlines the potential impact of Big Data on healthcare organizations, how to avoid drowning in the growing amount of mostly unstructured data, and most importantly, the long-term strategic need to convert this information into a strategic corporate asset.

"'Big Data' has become one of the hottest buzzword phrases in healthcare," said CTGHS Solutions Director Mike Garzone, who authored the white paper. "What many people don't understand though is exactly what it is or how it will impact the healthcare system. At CTGHS, we are many times asked by client organizations to help them determine out how to best leverage the massive amount of new data in order to ultimately drive quality improvement, enhance outcomes, and control costs."

Big Data refers to the explosive growth of data, much of it unstructured, which healthcare organizations are now seeing pouring in from electronic health records (EHRs), medical devices, secure messaging between patients and providers, new genome sequencing to enable personalized medicine, and many other sources - some not yet even known. Not only is the volume increasing almost exponentially, but with volume comes increasing complexity. The whitepaper explains why traditional relational databases and other tools are no longer adequate to capture, analyze and report on data. This paper describes the importance of building a foundation using business intelligence (BI) technology and other advancements in order to successfully mine the data.

The white paper lays out a series of steps organizations must undertake to launch a successful Big Data initiative or program, including:

• Building a data-driven culture. This shift can, and often does, require organizations' to revisit strategic goals and core business processes. It is a "top-down" process demanding ongoing support from the executive team to imple­ment two vitally important programs: data governance and master data management.
• Establishing data governance. Organizations must define roles, responsibilities, accountability and workflow by assigning ownership and management of data elements across the enterprise. Data owners are supported by business and technical data stewards who prepare data definitions, algorithms for metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Data stewards play a critical role in data quality assurance and creating a single source of truth, which is essential if stakeholders are to have high confidence in the data they need to make decisions.
• Executing MDM. Master Data Management (MDM) is technology that enables data governance and allows data owners and stewards to easily maintain their organization's data assets. Many data governance initiatives fail because they lack an MDM strategy, making it too onerous to maintain the quality of the data. Thus, it is imperative enterprises develop a strategy for incorporating Big Data (with all its unstructured data) within their existing data architecture.
• Assessing the functionality and usability of IT tools. For example, most EHRs are transactional systems, but vendors are beginning to offer BI capabilities for their EHR products. Third parties also are starting to sell cloud-based analytical platforms to augment EHRs. Organization should only buy products that support their ability to tackle current and future business challenges, integrate with their overall data structure and position them to meet future Big Data needs.

CTG Health Solutions' white paper also urges entities to routinely review their information management strategy, to consider new technologies and advancements; select applications that meet a specific need, and to make security a top priority.

"Big Data in healthcare is still relatively new and much about it is unknown at this time," stated Garzone. "However, it is here to stay and healthcare organizations that make the investment required to obtain insights and extract value from the surging volume of structured and unstructured data will best be able to respond to the continuous pressure to deliver higher quality care at lower cost and thereby gain a tremendous competitive edge."

The complimentary paper can be downloaded at http://www.ctg.com/industries/healthcare-providers/thought-leadership/white-papers/.

About CTG Health Solutions
CTG Health Solutions (CTGHS), the healthcare division of CTG, is a leading information technology consulting firm dedicated solely to helping healthcare institutions, physician practices, payers, and related organizations achieve clinical and financial goals through effective technology and business solutions. Over the last 25 years, CTGHS has provided healthcare IT, and operational and strategic consulting support to more than 600 healthcare organizations. CTG is a publicly-traded IT services and solutions company that was founded in 1966 and operates in North America and Western Europe. For more information, visit www.ctghs.com.