Overcoming Data Analytics Challenges

At Health IT Outcomes, we’ve made it our mission to provide the healthcare industry with expert guidance on technology system selection, integration, project management, and change management. To help achieve this goal, we speak with industry leaders on everything from EHRs to HIEs to HIM, then share these conversations with you. We recently traveled to Chicago to attend HIMSS15 where we had the privilege to speak with Jyoti Kamal, president and Chief Data Scientist with Healthcare Data Works about the company’s origins, how it serves the market, and predictive analytics.

Health IT Voices: Jyoti, before we get into our important conversation, tell us about you and your background and give us that 10,000-foot view of Healthcare Data Works.

Jyoti: I come from an analytics background and am one of the co-founders of Healthcare Data Works. We’ve been in business more than seven years and the technology behind our product was developed at Ohio State where I was the deputy CIO for a long time.

The intent of the company was to provide health systems and providers with an easy to use analytic tool that would allow them to integrate data from different source systems. That’s a challenge for a lot of people because most of them have to do this manually.

Our plan was to provide a solution that would integrate this data curated in a manner that would make it easy for the customers to access in a self-service environment. This would enable and empower them to use and apply analytics to improve performance, for revenue enhancements, and for quality improvements.

Health IT Voices: Tell us how Healthcare Data Works is helping health systems.

Jyoti: There have been a lot of mandates, even from a regulatory perspective, for reduction of re-admissions. We have provided not just data integration and analytics for our customers, but also predictive analytics which can help determine the patient populations with the highest risk for re-admissions. This allows health systems to proactively manage data in a way to mitigate the risk of patients being readmitted.

There are pretty severe penalties if the readmission rate is not below a certain percentage. We have helped our customers by reducing re-admissions and keeping these rates low. We’ve also aided our customers in monitoring hospital acquired conditions (HACs). If a patient comes to the hospital and acquires certain conditions, then it impacts your reimbursement and infection control.

We’re able to show our customers a real dollar value and return on their investment by pointing out opportunities where there is revenue loss happening. Now they’re able to stop that as a result of the analytics available from our solution.

Health IT Voices: How quickly do physicians adopt to predictive analytics as a driver to change way the way they treat their patients?

Jyoti: It really is a culture shift. If you’re implementing an enterprise-wide solution, like what we provide, you have to emphasize the need to put data governance around it. It’s vital that the message trickle down to everyone so that they understand the value of it.

We also need to make clear this is not a threat to their job, rather it will make them more productive. It makes them do their job better and that’s where the education aspect comes in. And change of culture has to be emphasized from the leadership so that physicians are able to adopt that and see that it is for the good of the patient and the provider both.

Health IT Voices: What’s new at Health Data Works?

Jyoti: First and foremost, the technology behind our solution – it is a very robust data model. Now, with a new release that is coming out, we make it very easy for our customers to be able to enhance that model.

Dynamic data modeling makes it very powerful for customer to add elements without having to wait for time for us to model it for them. If they have a new data element that they want to capture, they can very easily send it to us. Our model is set up in a way that it will automatically, without any code changes, consume the data.

That’s a very powerful concept, that there is no code change required. It’s all what we call metadata-driven. As soon as we understand that there is a new subject area or new data element coming in, our technology will adapt to that and incorporate it in an efficient manner.

Health IT Voices: What is your view on the future of analytics?

Jyoti: We are early in development. That’s why we have another concept we offer to our customers – a data scientist. This scientist works shoulder to shoulder with them, to improve the adoption process of analytics.

We understand analytics are not being utilized fully. It’s not because people don’t want it, it’s just that people don’t understand what the power behind it. However, if you coach them, they are ready to consume it.

I agree the acceptance of data analytics is a challenge, but we have overcome it. We had this early on, with some of our customers. We had the solution, but it was slow in adoption. Once we offered this service to them, it just took off.