Most provider organizations have a strong desire and growing need to leverage their own data to improve care quality and overall performance, yet most are unable to access the information they need for data-driven initiatives.

That was among the key takeaways of a recent survey of more than 30 healthcare leaders in early April at a quality and performance improvement roundtable. The survey revealed that only 16% of participating health leaders rated their organizations’ performance above “neutral” in terms of leveraging data to define clinical best practices.

Unfortunately, the problem may get worse before it gets better. Many health leaders admit they are currently struggling to use data to improve performance – and the vast majority (96%) also predict that in the next three years their organizations will experience an increase in the number of data-driven knowledge projects that require data access.

Obtaining the human and financial resources needed to perform these data-driven projects is also likely to be a challenge: Only 36% of health leaders surveyed expect budget allocation increases for quality and performance improvement over the next three years, and 80% do not have enough analyst resources to meet the growing demand for knowledge work in performance improvement.

For healthcare organizations experiencing difficulty launching and sustaining data-driven performance improvement projects, one potential solution to consider is more flexible organization design and increasing self-service data access.

A deeper look at the problem

The survey highlights what has become an interesting juxtaposition in the industry as it relates to data-driven performance improvement: On the one hand, most provider organizations understand they need to do more with the data that they own to inform a wide range of use cases, including quality improvement, strategic planning, the transition to value-based care, physician and nurse resource allocation, and more. In some cases, leaders simply desire to use their own data assets to understand how they are performing as a baseline and use that information to identify opportunities to achieve a higher standard of quality and performance.

On the other hand, despite this obvious need, most organizations are unable to execute on this vision. In some cases, the barriers are technical in nature because data is stored in legacy transactional information systems that are cumbersome to navigate. To derive useful insights, these systems require specialized technical knowledge from skilled data analysts.

In these cases, a provider organization’s clinical staff may recognize the need and have the desire to be more data-driven but lack the mechanism to take action themselves. For example, some clinicians may want to test their own hypotheses against the organization’s data but lack the tools and resources to conduct a dialogue with that data.

Adding to the challenges are privacy laws governing the use of sensitive patient data. Indeed, health data is highly personal and deserves strong protection, but that protection can also impact a clinician’s ability to derive potential insights from the organization’s troves of valuable data.

Self-service and staff empowerment: A smarter way to democratize data access

Data literacy and data agility – the ability to quickly build and navigate through a data set to find insights – are skills common in healthcare professionals. Unfortunately, healthcare data is often organized in a fashion that requires additional coding, programming, and data-science skill sets that are much less common. To capitalize on the commonly available data skills, many health systems are investing in solutions that make data better organize and more accessible through no code/low code query capability and dynamic visualization tools.

By coupling these no-code/low code, easy-to-use extraction and modeling tools with privacy preservation technologies like synthetic data engines, clinicians and administrators are granted free access to the breadth of their health systems’ data, allowing them to participate in system-wide learning via “self-service” to ask their own novel questions that can yield new insights to spur patient care and quality improvement initiatives.

Health systems can empower more clinicians and administrators by offering self-service data access as part of a defined technology and services strategy that supports a dialogue with data to drive more quality and performance improvement initiatives at a much faster pace. Without the typical privacy challenges associated with patient data, health systems can widen the scope of potential users of that data and enable employees and defined improvement/support teams to work directly with the data to find opportunities that drive performance and clinical improvement.

To succeed in the new era of data-driven performance improvement, many healthcare organizations need to rethink their approach. By offering self-service data access, a focused streamlined team of data and workflow experts, and synthetic data, healthcare organizations can empower their clinicians to perform their own analyses and expand the opportunities to generate insights that improve care quality.

Photo: Galeanu Mihai, Getty Images