In the week leading up to this year’s MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Symposium, SiliconANGLE presented a series previewing the event, themed ‘Big Data Demands Good Data’. Our series focused on presenting a synopsis of some of the important topics scheduled to be covered in Cambridge the following week.

Today we are re-visiting the presentation offered by Dr. David Levine, Vice President of Informatics/Medical Director of Comparative Data and Informatics for United Healthcare. In his session, Levine addressed how the recent and rapid improvements in both data collection and data analytics must be embraced by health administrators in order to affect better patient care.

However, the difference between saying and doing is, at times, difficult to overcome. The mountains of data collected by the healthcare industry require education in the ability to analyze it with the intent of designing better predictive models for both patient care and hospital administration. As mentioned in our preview article, Chris Belmont, CIO at New Orleans’ Ochsner Health System stated, “We have the data points. We just have to do a better job of getting our hands around the data and understanding it better.”

On SiliconANGLEs theCUBE, which live-streamed from the symposium, hosts Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin sat down with Anthony Donofrio, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice-President with Truven Healthcare Analytics, to discuss the future of data collection and data analytics within the healthcare industry, specifically.

Donofrio’s company offers analytic products at all levels in the healthcare industry. He breaks it down to consumers, providers and payers, with each community receiving data analysis for their specific community.

In the interview, which you can watch in its entirety here:

Donofrio explains the best use practices for each of the products, medical privacy rights and how their system effectively addresses them, and how Truven Healthcare Analytics is embracing the Hadoop platform.

In another interview conducted by Vellante and Gillin that day, they welcomed Dr. Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Healtcare Transformation with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Much of the discussion focused on the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR).

In the interview, which you can watch in its entirety here:

Mostashari energetically details the rapid adoption of EHRs over the last four years and how the air of inevitability undertaken by the government and industry was responsible for the increase. In that span of time, hospitals utilizing EHRs surged from 9 percent to 44 percent. He goes on to discuss how the “do more, bill more” paradigm is soon to go the way of the do-do, to be replaced by healthcare delivery that focuses solely on improving healthcare outcomes, rewarding practitioners for quality of healthcare delivery over quantity of healthcare delivery.

Mostashari speaks on several other topics throughout the interview, (google: The Blue Button) that are very interesting whether you are a data professional or simply a citizen. I urge you to take 24 minutes to watch the interview on how Big Data is revolutionizing the healthcare industry.

In yet another interview from the event, Vellante and Gillin spoke with Michael Nix, Director of Analytics of the James M. Jeffords Institute for Quality and Operational Effectiveness, Fletcher Allen Health Care. Fletcher Allen is one of the larger healthcare providers in northern New England, with facilities dedicated to both emergency and recuperative care and providing traditional general practitioner care.

Nix acknowledged the upcoming paradigm shift but also discussed the obstacles and possible pitfalls when dealing with industry-wide regulation. In his full interview, which you can see here:

Nix stated, “We as healthcare delivery systems must learn to push back into these policies and say they are not resulting in the best possible care.” He believes the main goal should be to share information to provide the best possible care. HIPAA and the Affordable Care Act are trying to achieve conflicting objectives, he explained, but the technology is going to push the policy envelope and the public perception.

Check back tomorrow for our rundown on discussions focused on how data quality is especially important in the financial services industry. Also, be sure to check out all of the coverage from SiliconANGLEs theCUBE by visiting our YouTube channel for all of or interviews from this year’s MIT CDOIQ Symposium.