Healthcare data entrepreneurs and practitioners are having lively discussions these days, calling for fresh and innovative approaches to better serve virtually every stakeholder in their healthcare ecosystem.

What strikes me is that the healthcare “iron triangle” issues everybody is talking about – cost, quality, and care access – are not being adequately addressed to the benefit of their consumer constituents.

Most healthcare data initiatives focus on specific and narrow issues, unable to pass through the walls of the well-established, siloed and transaction centric EHR systems, data warehouses, data lakes, customized and poorly informed reports, and dashboards.

For example, patients’ waiting time to access care services is framed by the provider’s unilateral, workflow protocols and policies rather than being guided by data-driven to align the patient experience with operational efficiency and the best cost-outcome ratio.

Before deciding to invest in new EHR embedded analytics as a basis for the solution, it can be enlightening to step back and ask will another siloed application or a targeted data mart add value to your constituents?  It’s important to think about the possibilities when utilizing data not only in your EHR system or a DataMart but additional information sources available elsewhere in your payer-provider-patient ecosystem.

Imagine a single governed healthcare data ecosystem available to everyone – clinical experts, business managers, data scientists, IT, care coordinators, providers, payers, and others – that can be used to innovate and drive new approaches to healthcare across organizational boundaries and the system.  What if you could put all your internal, external, and unstructured data sources to work in domains ranging from Supply Chain, Clinical Workload, Research, to Patient Engagement, Population Health, Workflow interoperability, and the continuum of care to create more positive outcomes?

Seeing is the ultimate validation of the art of the possible. At this year’s HIMSS conference in Orlando, my colleague and I will be demonstrating this healthcare data platform-as-a-service in a live setting targeted for IT and healthcare professionals. In my next blog, I will begin to share the details of how our governed healthcare data platform and pipeline works illustrated by new innovative data-driven use cases, stay tuned!  We hope you can join us.