How analytics roadmaps can break organizations from vicious data cycles

Value-based care requires healthcare executives to deploy robust analytics. But before that can happen, healthcare organizations need the supporting tools, processes, technology, people and organizational structure in place. It’s easier said than done.

For LifeBridge Health, which well into its analytics journey, it all started with developing a scalable and effective analytics roadmap and a data governance model.

“I had come from another organization that had started the process of putting together a roadmap for data analytics and had recognized the requirement that the really hard work of data governance was just absolutely an essential partner with picking a tool,” said Tressa Springmann, senior vice president and CIO, information services. “The senior team kept saying we need a scorecard, a dashboard, we need to know how we’re doing. Unfortunately, that sounds really easy, but what is really difficult is understanding from them what is the data they want that they can act on, and then how to walk backward through our data sources to make sure we have clean data that is able to inform whatever that scorecard is.”

Unfortunately, that opened up a can of worms.

“For a lot of organizations, including the one I came from, it becomes a vicious cycle conversation,” Springmann said. “I want A, help me understand B, I want C, and the folks who are using this data don’t have the appetite to understand the detailed, foundational work that needs to be done in order to have reliable, actionable data. That is just the reality of it.”

But Springmann worked through the problems at her previous employer and got to a good place when it came to analytics, a roadmap and data governance.

“I came here to LifeBridge and I was just coming off this high where my organization had finally gotten it,” she said. “We had the organization talking about the right details around data governance. We also had data stewardship discussions where if you want that data to be clear, the registrar had to have a commitment all the way through the life of that information. I was coming from an organization that took me a number of years and they finally got it and were starting to walk as opposed to crawl.