When you order a book or an item from Amazon and they say ‘people like you have also ordered these things’ - we’re not doing that progressively in healthcare. I think we need to, more or less, ‘Amazon-ize’ ourselves; we need to get out in front of things and try to understand what’s going on in our organization and stay ahead of the curve and not react to patient events as they occur, but ask, ‘how do we get out in front of them, and prevent them from occurring?’

Q: What have been the challenges you’ve encountered as you work to harness big data? What challenges are specific to public health entities?
Belmont: That culture of being more retrospective and reactive: as in, ‘give me a report and I’ll act on it;’ that’s so 1990’s, and before. So I guess our culture still is, ‘give me a two-dimensional piece of paper with data on it, and I’ll find out things.’ We have more of a pull-mentality of ‘I’ll go out and get a report, and I’ll pull it when I remember it.’ I think we need to move more toward a push-mentality, so as events occur, we can present it to the right people so they can react to it, whether it’s a physician, or an operator who is managing a piece of the business and so on.

Stevenson (pictured at right): On the data side of things, to us, the technology is not scary. We have all the data, and the technology to be able to pull that data together and smash it, merge it, and make sense of it. To us, that’s the easy part; technology is easy.

We’re a medium to large-sized healthcare organization. Data lives across silos, and every silo has an owner or a hierarchy relative to the ownership of that data. What’s interesting about that is, getting the silos to become a more centralized platform, a more centralized methodology, is kind of easy on the technology side. On the people side - the governing side - is where it’s hard. We’re finding that a lot of our challenges are not necessarily getting the data to make sense, but getting the people to agree that the data makes sense. So going forward, our core focus is really going to be on the people, and not necessarily on the technology.

Q: Looking ahead to the future, what are some things you think all healthcare organizations should be considering right now to harness big data?
Belmont: I think there are some immediate issues, there are some near-term issues, and I think there’s long-term. So immediately, we’re being faced with things like meaningful-use reporting that’s being put into place. We have to show meaningful use and that’s going to require a lot of data collaborated from a lot of different systems. A lot of that information does not exist in one of the core platforms, so people are going to have to create big data type structures so that they can do this reporting. And remember that meaningful use is not just during the incentive period. In 2014 after the incentives are over and beyond, it will actually be a penalty. So if you’re not a meaningful user after the incentive period, they’ll actually reduce your reimbursement. So I think that’s the immediate thing.

I think, near-term, as healthcare continues to morph, how do we provide data to support the decisions to do the modeling? So if we decide to go into an accountable care organization, how do we have data that supports that, instead of just playing a hunch that says, “we think that’s a good deal and let’s go for it?”

To read the end of our interview please continue onto the next page...