UPDATED 08:40 EDT / AUGUST 22 2013

Data Quality : A Matter of Life or Death in Healthcare

Many of the speakers at this year’s MIT Chief Development Officer Information Quality Symposium attended on behalf of companies in the healthcare industry, where data quality often makes the difference between life and death. Peter Anlyan, the co-chair of the event and owner of Anlyan Consulting, discussed how Big Data is disrupting this segment in an interview on theCube.

Anlyan, a former baseball executive, said that team building is just as important in healthcare as it is in team sports. He added that healthcare providers must take a top-down approach to Big Data in order to reduce complexity and create a dynamic organizational culture that can keep up with the rapid pace of innovation.

Michael Nix, the director of analytics at the James M. Jeffords Institute for Quality and Operational Effectiveness, expressed a similar view on the industry’s Big Data transformation. “Every organization that delivers healthcare is acutely interested in trying to overcome the structural obstacles,” he said, stressing the importance of data quality for patients. “As we think of data quality, we’re thinking about it in terms of delivering care to the patient, what is the implication of not knowing or having the wrong info when making critical decisions.”

The rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHR) plays a big part in making data-driven healthcare a reality. Dr. Farzad Mosthashari, the man who popularized the technology, gave us the insider’s take on this trend.

Mosthashari serves as the the national coordinator for health care transformation at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS.) He told theCube hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly that only nine percent of hospitals used EHRs when he joined the organization in 2009, compared with 44 percent today.

EHRs and data analytics can address many of the challenges faced by traditional health care providers, but not without introducing new issues relating to compliance and security. Hadoop and other Big Data technologies were not created with these requirements in mind, but Zettaset and other vendors are gradually making Big Data more viable for the enterprise.


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