As I mentioned in my previous blog post How To Position Analytics as a Strategic Resource Within Your Organization, context is what frames the various challenges and pressures facing an organization, and describes what and why the organization is striving to improve. Common areas of  innovation and improvement being sought by many organizations include:

• Quality – how well the enterprise is doing what it is that it’s supposed to be doing,
• Financial – how cost-effective the enterprise is in conducting its operations,
• Performance  – how efficient the organization is, and
• Satisfaction – how happy key clients/customers are with the service received, or outcomes obtained.

In essence, context is what connects what an organization is trying to improve with the methodology how it is going to achieve those improvements, and how it is going to monitor and evaluate progress. The key components of context consist of:

• Goals – description of what the organization is improving, and by how much,
• Strategy – the approach(s) such as Lean or Six Sigma to be used to achieve desired improvements (important because which QI approaches are utilized will impact what data is required, how it is analyzed, and how it is communicated).
• Measurement – the indicators to monitor progress towards improvement, and the methods used for obtaining and summarizing data.

In an organization, stakeholders are those people who use and/or rely on, develop, or are impacted by analytics. Stakeholders range from executives in the “corporate office” to personnel working on the front-lines of the enterprise. A clear and thorough understanding of context by the various stakeholders guides the development of appropriate analytics tools (including dashboards, simulations, and data analyses) that helps to ensure both ongoing and planned improvement activities throughout the enterprise are aligned and  support of improvement goals.

The objectives of improvement initiatives should align with the quality objectives of the enterprise as a whole. This prevents even further misdirected/wasted activity and enables monitoring progress and outcomes. When deploying analytics, always ask “are we taking appropriate and necessary steps towards achieving the organization’s quality and performance goals?” Without clearly stated goals, a viable approach to achieving the goals, and a commitment to measure performance, any attempt at “improvement” will likely result in disjointed (at best), or conflicting (at worst) changes to policies, processes, and workflows, that may be ultimately detrimental to quality, performance, efficiency, and client satisfaction.

The challenge: how can organizations leverage available data  and analytics resources in innovative (and revolutionary) ways to achieve breakthrough transformation in quality, performance, competitiveness, and customer satisfaction?

Many organizations feel that “leveraging data” means building many reports, and fulfilling a high number of ad hoc data requests, as if the volume of reports & requests is an accurate reflection of analytics value and team productivity. What many organizations don’t realize is that many of the ad hoc data requests are necessary because the reports being built don’t really answer the needs of decision-makers in the first place. In reality, high numbers of reports and ad hoc data requests likely indicate that analytics are not deployed nor utilized optimally within an organization.

Analytics must be a strategic resource for operational transformation within your organization, and not just a collection of reports. But if the analytics team is struggling to keep up with all the analysis to be done, how do they know if they are, or make efforts to become, a “strategic resource”? One point of clarification: I don’t mean strategic in the sense of serving only executive level stakeholders; on the contrary, to serve an organization well, analytics must penetrate all levels of an organization to inform better decision making. Strategic, in this sense, simply refers to analytics being seen as a true investment that provides value to the whole organization, not simply a cost centre that some people use to pull data.

Analytics become a strategic resource for your organization through understanding the organization’s information and decision-making needs and by using analytics to identify opportunities for improvement, transformation, and even breakout performance. This understanding is achieved through:

• recognizing the context (i.e., business and quality improvement goals) in which analytics are being applied, and
• through extensive dialogue  with key stakeholders regarding their data and decision making needs.

With context and dialog illuminating the performance goals of the organization, the innovative use of data analytics can help achieve superior depth and clarity of insight into performance, quality, and operations. This is only possible, however, when organizations:

• have access to the right financial, process, and domain-specific data from various source systems,
• have the proper analytics teams in place with required knowledge and skill sets,
• apply the most suitable analytical techniques (i.e., predictive modelling, simulation, machine learning, etc) using the most appropriate tools (or software), and
• deploy analytics via the necessary enabling technology (i.e., cloud service or on premise hardware).

There are many more considerations to an analytics system within an organization than simply what, or how many, reports need to be developed. Only by considering all these six points (context, dialogue, data, teams, tools & techniques, & technology) can organizations begin to realize the potential of analytics as a truly strategic resource central to transformation efforts. Otherwise organizations will remain trapped in the “reporting rut” with no discernible path for analytics to help achieve the transformational performance desired.

Please join me for a webinar I am conducting with the National Institutes of Health Informatics (NIHI) on November 2, 2016. Entitled Data Analytics Primer for Healthcare Leaders: Transforming management with (the proper) analytics, this session will provide healthcare leaders with the essential information they need to fully leverage the power of the data within their healthcare organizations.

During this 1.5 hour session, I will cover how to synthesize data from source systems with proven Quality Improvement (QI) methodologies, well-defined quality and performance goals, and powerful analytical methods to enable more insightful, fact-based decisions within a healthcare organization.

The purpose of this webinar is to help enable your healthcare organization to better:

• Transform analytics from a collection of reports & dashboards to a fully integrated management system and drive evidence-informed decision-making at all levels within the healthcare organization
• Deploy the optimal data, team, technology, and analytical techniques to achieve the performance goals of your organization
• Align quality and performance goals of management, departments, and programs to provide actionable intelligence for healthcare executives and transformation teams

In addition, one webinar participant will be randomly selected to win a copy of my recent book, “Healthcare Analytics for Quality and Performance Improvement.”

Please visit this webinar’s page on the NIHI website  to learn more about this upcoming webinar and to register.

The Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2) Toronto Health IT Summit begins on Wednesday, September 21st, 2016. I am proud to be co-chairing this event with Shirley Fenton, VP and Director at the National Institutes of Health Informatics, and  Mark Stevens, Principal at ARRA Health Consulting, Inc.

This year’s event will prove to be especially relevant, including presentations and panel discussions on topics such as:

• Information security and privacy
• Mining big data for value-based healthcare
• Managing data management resources
• eHealth education supply and demand

Especially exciting this year is a feature called Innovation Nation, which is a “Shark Tank” like session that will spotlight several of Canada’s hottest Health IT startups.

Follow me @tstrome on Twitter for live updates throughout the event and keep reading http://HealthcareAnalytics.info for more detailed summaries.

If you attend ONE Health IT conference this year, make it the Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2) Toronto Health IT Summit!

I am pleased to announce that Shirley Fenton, VP and Director at the National Institutes of Health Informatics, Mark Stevens, Principal at ARRA Health Consulting, Inc., and I will be co-hosting the Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT²) Toronto Health IT Summit on September 21-22, 2016.

iHT² Health IT Summits are renowned for gathering healthcare leaders to present important information and share insights. Discussions and interactive sessions lead to shared learnings and exceptional networking. Healthcare leaders participate in transformative discussions and benefit from a unique environment for learning and professional growth.

Some of the topics on-deck for September’s Summit in Toronto include:

• Security & Data Protection: High Tech & High Touch
• Big Data Mining for Value-based Healthcare
• Managing Data Management Resources
• Meeting the eHealth Education Need
• Encouraging Innovation within Healthcare Organizations

Over the next several weeks prior to the event, I will be highlighting selected speakers and Summit sessions. In the mean time, please feel free to visit the iHT² Toronto Health IT Summit website.

We are looking forward to having you join us in Toronto in September for this important Health IT event!

This has been a busy week in the world of healthcare analytics! I have come across a lot of interesting articles, videos, and other resources this week that I’ll share with you below.

I will be making the Analytics Update a weekly feature, so if you have any articles, resources, or news bits that you’d like me to post, don’t hesitate to email me: trevor@healthcareanalytics.info.

News & Blog Articles

Below are a collection of news and blog articles pertaining to the analytics industry in general, and healthcare analytics in particular.

• Mobile app uses analytics to predict hospital readmission
• How to brainstorm like a Googler
• The Four P’s of Analytics
• The Toronto Raptors are IBM’s Watson to draft a winning team
• A designer’s guide to the Artificial Intelligence industry
• Artificial Intelligence’s “White Guy” problem
• Former NASA chief unveils $100 million neural chip maker KnuEdge
• MIT’s answer to global health issues: Democratizing big data analytics
• Why investments in Big Data and Analytics are not yet paying off
• 12 algorithms that every data scientist should know
• A.I. downs expert human fighter pilot in dogfights
• Key tools of Big Data for Transformation: Review & Case Study
• Google Flu Trends Spatial Variability Validated Against Emergency Department Influenza-Related Visits

Videos

Quadcopter Navigation in the Forest using Deep Neural Networks

Special Reports & White Papers

Below is where relevant industry reports and white papers that have been recently released (or those that can be considered “classics”) are listed.

Broken Links – Why analytics investments have yet to pay off

Tutorials / Education

R Tutorial: An R introduction to statistics

Join me for four Healthcare Analytics online sessions that will kick-start your analytical productivity in 2016 

I am pleased to announce that I will be instructing a series of four one-hour interactive online sessions in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health Informatics (NIHI). Entitled Data Analytics Essentials for Today’s Healthcare Organization, the series will focus on providing participants with the essential knowledge required to better utilize healthcare data and analytics for informing administrative and clinical decision-making. In the sessions, participants will learn what healthcare analytics is, and how analytics tools and techniques can be leveraged to improve healthcare quality and performance improvement initiatives.

The four sessions of the series are:

1. Introduction to Healthcare Analytics (Feb 18, 2016)
2. Numeric and Data Literacy (Feb 25, 2016)
3. Quality and Performance Improvement with Analytics (Mar 3, 2016)
4. Advanced Analytics (Machine Learning, Simulation, Visualization, etc..) (Mar 10, 2016)

Please visit the NIHI Website for more details. If you register before Jan 22, 2016, you will qualify for the early-bird registration rate.

It’s hard to believe that it will be two years next month since my first book “Healthcare Analytics for Quality and Performance Improvement” was published, in October 2013, by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Since the book was published, it has been the selected textbook for many health analytics and health policy classes at institutions such as UCLA, and has been used by healthcare analytics professionals around the globe to expand their healthcare improvement toolbox.

To help celebrate this exciting milestone, between now and December 2015, I’ll be releasing some new material, and updating some original material that appeared in the book. One of the updates will include a major revamp of the resources section of the website to better organize existing resources and include new resources that have come on-line since the book was published. I have been working on the addition of new material as well, including hands-on examples of healthcare analytics problems and solutions (including source code in R and/or Python where applicable), and I’ll be adding some new slide decks (including an “Introduction to R” tutorial).

Thanks to everyone who has read my book, and especially those who have provided feedback. It is because of your feedback that I can continue to update resources and references, and add fresh new material. I am looking forward to keeping the content up-to-date and relevant to this quickly evolving field of healthcare analytics!

More about my book:

To learn more about Healthcare Analytics for Quality and Performance Improvement, click here  for more information and to download a free sample chapter. To purchase a copy of the book, follow this link to order on Amazon.com.

Save The Date!

Coming this September 17 & 18 in Vancouver BC is the first Canadian Health IT Summit hosted by the Institute for Health Technology Transformation. This event will be an excellent opportunity for healthcare leaders to discuss important technology trends and issues that impact healthcare quality, safety, and efficiency. The panel discussions and case study presentations allow for an energetic exchange of ideas, discussion of emerging best practices, and the sharing of lessons learned.

I will be co-chairing the event with my good friend and esteemed colleague Dr Jat Sandhu, the Regional Director, Public Health Surveillance Unit, of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Together we’ve invited many of the most influential HIT thought leaders from across Canada and internationally.

For More Details

I hope that you will join us in beautiful Vancouver for this important Health IT event. Please click here for more details about the IHT2 Vancouver Health IT Summit. I will be blogging more about this exciting event as we get closer to the summit date.

I’m looking forward to seeing you there!!

You’ll Learn About Leveraging Big Data with this HIMSS Virtual Briefing

If your healthcare organization is deciding how best to benefit from big data, you’ll be interested in this upcoming virtual briefing from HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society). On August 5, 2015 HIMSS will be hosting a webinar entitled “Big Data, Big Insight: A Conversation with Healthcare Analytics Leaders”.

According to the webinar registration site, this unique session will present key highlights of the current state of, challenges and trends in big data and healthcare analytics. This webinar follows on the successful Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum held in New York City on June 17 – 19, 2015. HIMSS has gathered a panel of leading healthcare analytics experts and leaders who will join this session to summarize the findings from the forum, and to engage in a deep dialogue with participants about big data and healthcare analytics.

Be sure to sign up for “Big Data, Big Insight: A Conversation with Healthcare Analytics Leaders” by clicking on the link and reserving your spot. There is no cost to sign up!