For healthcare organizations, the ability to harness data and turn it into useful information can sometimes feel like moving mountains. But in Sentara’s case, it was more like moving buses – or more accurately, mobile clinics.
Tim Skeen, EVP & Enterprise CIO, Sentara Healthcare
Because of the enterprise data platform that had been put into place, the organization was able to identify areas with the highest need and “move those clinics accordingly to make the best impact on the community,” said Tim Skeen, EVP and Enterprise CIO at Sentara Healthcare. “It takes a lot of data to understand that you’re directing them in the right places.”
During a recent Keynote interview with Bill Russell, Founder of This Week Health, Skeen and fellow guest Peter Marks (VP & CIO, WakeMed) discussed their most pressing priorities and how their teams are leveraging data to move the needle.
For Sentara, that has meant pivoting away from brick-and-mortar locations and focusing more on mobile units, while in WakeMed’s case, it was expanding to include more services – specifically, offering mammograms to patients in underserved areas. “When you start talking about data, you really have to understand what the organization is trying to achieve,” said Marks. “We’ve been able to help a lot of patients – these are the stories that melt your heart.”
But before those stories can be told, a lot has to happen behind the scenes, as Skeen learned when he took on the CIO role in 2020. Although there were data lakes being utilized for basic reporting and analytics, data “wasn’t seen as strategic and valuable.” And so, one of his first objectives was to implement a roadmap for entering data into the environment. “Whether it’s homegrown or third-party analytics, you need an enterprise data platform that has a proper ontology and a proper cleanliness and quality to it,” he said. Doing so enabled users to leverage external data, including social determinants, to provide personalized care to current patients, while also allowing them to predict future care needs.
What this does, according to Skeen, is create a “data fabric” in which data are linked to operational stores to ensure interoperability across all platforms, internally and externally, while also allowing data to be ubiquitous in the environment. Getting that framework into place is “foundational,” he noted.
Also critical was the decision to form an architecture team and assign business data architects (BDAs) for each of the three main components: risk, population health, and ambulatory. “When you think about new ambulatory care models and how that blows up into a virtual care paradigm, these BDAs, along with data literacy, are going to level up quite a bit the conversation we’re trying to have as peers between the technologists and data science folks and the business,” said Skeen. “We recognize that part of the problem is with technologists assuming that people understand what they’re talking about. That’s a big piece of it.”
“That’s the driver”
WakeMed has also experienced challenges with wrangling data, according to Marks, who recalled the effort to “move the needle” about five years ago. Securing an investment, however, was going to require metrics, which they were able to show after successfully utilizing the HIMSS Analytics model.
Peter Marks, VP & CIO, WakeMed
The key for his team was having the right mindset. “Descriptive data is nice and we need to see it, but if we’re not moving the ball with outcomes, you have to ask, how much value are we getting from it? We have to be able to map the outcomes. That’s the driver,” Marks noted.
Increasingly, one of those objectives is around leveraging data to improve care at the community level, which entails capturing data from schools, churches, food banks, and other organizations.
“This is more than just clinicians taking care of folks. This is a village trying to take care of this population,” said Marks. “The more data you can glean about where they are in terms of food scarcity, where they’re living, and transportation issues – all those things allow you to support that population much more effectively.”
The data, however, are “massive and hard to wrangle,” he pointed out. And, like most health systems, WakeMed doesn’t have the resources to tackle it alone. “We’ve got to do this in partnership with vendors that are out there driving it.”
Gravitational pulls
Those vendor relationships, CIOs are finding, have become critical to many aspects of the role, including cybersecurity, a topic that’s “always top of mind,” according to Marks. But whereas in the past, the focus was primarily on securing the perimeter, now it's just as much about keeping open lines of communication with vendors about third-party breaches.
However, while it’s certainly beneficial to be aware, it’s important not to let security displace other pressing matters. “This is one of those gravitational pulls that we either can get sucked into and it can paralyze us moving forward or we can use it as an opportunity to drive where we need to be,” said Skeen. “Let’s think about other investments that allow us to recover and be more resilient,” whether that means cloud computing, segmentation, or application rationalization.
The objective, he added, should be on creating and maintaining “a platform and an architecture that’s resilient,” which, for most organizations, isn’t a reality yet. “We need to focus a lot more on that as opposed to letting some of the security components take up 80 percent of our time.”
And while it can be a difficult stance to take, particularly with growing pressure coming from the board to avoid cyber attacks, it has become mission critical,” Marks noted. “As a CIO and leader, we have the opportunity to stand up and say, ‘Listen, we're not ignoring this, but it’s important that you don’t forget about all these other pieces because it's really important to where the industry is going right now.’”
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