Health system CIOs and IT leaders are technical experts and strategic visionaries. They’re talent recruiters and team builders. And now they’re adding a new skill: storytelling.
At Salt Lake City-based University of Utah Health, CIO Donna Roach has a digital roadmap with six main focus areas easily understandable by the executive team. One of those main areas is the data architecture. None of the other areas would be possible without the strong architecture.
“We’ve worked very hard quietly building some of that out and funding it,” said Ms. Roach during a session at the Becker’s 15th Annual Meeting in April. “I have been very purposeful about funding the architecture, which has been built out in many areas, including the emergency department. It has a great structure and is very supported. But what we need is an interoperability layer.”
Health systems need strong data operations to support interoperability, which have traditionally been described as enterprise data warehouses. But that’s old terminology, said Ms. Roach.
“Now we’re really updating our data ecosystem and getting people to think more about a new ecosystem that is a real, living and breathing kind of structure,” she said. “I’m trying to refine my storytelling in that the data ecosystem needs to be fed and nurtured along.”
The University of Utah Health has created a data lake structure instead of the enterprise data warehouse structure, which lends itself to a strong visual analogy for non-technical leaders. Instead of talking about the “data fabric,” she talks about their data lake as having houses. When new parties come in – such as researchers or medical groups – and request data access, she can grant them permission to enter some houses but not others. She can put security controls on the access for each party as well as business intelligence tools if needed.
“I give them controls without limiting what they can do, but then I also protect the whole data lake so they’re not accessing everything,” said Ms. Roach. “We’ve worked through this consent. It has taken close to five years to get to the point where we’ve updated our whole interoperability strategy. We have a whole different interface engine concept. My informaticists love it because now I have an API strategy. I have a FHIR strategy. I’m very careful about using those terms with my executives because they don’t know what I’m talking about. I lose them. So I have to talk about making access to the data lake a lot easier.”
Despite the great progress made, Ms. Roach knows there’s still a long way to go. And she’s got an analogy for that too.
“I have a paved road; sometimes it’s going to still be a gravel road. But we’ll work on improving access, turning on access, turning off access, securing access and giving the audit controls that I need to have,” she said. “So it’s evolved, but it’s taken a lot of the technical expertise that’s hard for executives, who are very smart people, to follow if I go too deep into the depths of the data lake and what could be at the bottom.”
Amanda Mikhail takes a similar approach at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic.
“We are fortunate to have an executive team that does understand that data is our new currency, and data liquidity is the lubricant that moves all of this together,” she said. “That’s helpful, but once we get about one layer past that, it’s the same conversations Donna described. The storytelling is so important and there have been moments where I’ve been going forward with a pretty significant ask and realizing that I’m losing my audience because they see data and data foundations as plumbing. It’s a sewer system, it’s the stuff that runs under the road and I want to say ‘no, that’s actually your super highway. It’s your speedtrain.’ It’s a matter of changing that idea.”
Ms. Mikhail, division chair of research innovation and digital solutions at Mayo Clinic, and her team are currently trying to wrap their arms around working with the existing data architecture and building it up in anticipation of what they’ll need next.
“We need to invest in infrastructure and talent. One of the things we’re struggling with right now is finding the right people that can be on board with us,” said Amanda. “We’re getting that buy-in because we’re talking supertrain, not plumbing, so that’s a good thing, but now we need to have people who will work for us and with us.”
Many health systems work with a variety of contractors for specialized needs they don’t have inhouse. But Amanda is concerned about who will know the underlying technology if she doesn’t have a dedicated staff.
“I need someone who knows where the bodies are buried, she said. “I don’t want contractors right now. I want people who really understand this infrastructure and know where the bodies are buried, so that we don’t build something that isn’t really robust.”
Jawad Khan, vice president of enterprise analytics at Akron Children’s Hospital shared a unique solution to ensure his team intertwined the organization’s mission with the data architecture. Akron Children’s named its data platform “KIDDO” to ensure the patients are at the center of the analytics program. The acronym stands for: Knowledge, Information, Data, Design and Operations.
“We came up with it together, and we wanted to keep the patient perspective centralized to the discussion of how we’re doing data because that’s the reason we’re designing the data platform, to make sure we can provide that integrated data analytics for patient-centric care,” said Mr. Khan. “It doesn’t matter whether they are coming to our institution for a lab or clinical appointment. Whatever the case may be, the information should be readily available on top of the KIDDOs. That’s the story we’ve been repeating again and again, and trying to take away the acronyms and give more meaning to what people are accessing the data for because if you want to access the data for a specific purpose, and if the purpose is centered around the patient, then it becomes so much more of an easy story to tell. The investments become easier for the executives.”
