Challenges to Implementing Healthcare Analytics

Executive Summary

During a workshop at the Healthcare Analytics Symposium held in Chicago in July, a study was conducted by the Healthcare Center of Excellence (healthcarecoe.org) to determine what the participants perceived were the top challenges they faced in implementing analytics at their healthcare organization. The participants included people from all levels of healthcare organizations from locations across the country. Each participant was asked to identify up to 5 challenges they faced in implementing healthcare analytics. They were also asked to then work in a group and develop 3 solutions to overcome the top challenges they identified. While the challenges facing healthcare analytics implementation may not surprise anyone, the ranking of the challenges might receive some unexpected attention.

The Root Cause of Many EHR Implementation Failures is Bad Leadership

We recently learned of another C-level executive resigning over a failed or challenged EHR implementation (CEO of Georgia Hospital Resigns After Rocky EHR Implementation). These stories are beginning to come with increased frequency as most healthcare organizations are deep into their EHR implementation cycle. If you look closely, the reasons are almost always the same, i.e., lack of physician engagement, difficult implementation time frames or lack of the proper resources. When I read these stories, I usually come to one primary reason for the failure – bad leadership in two distinct areas.

Leadership Skills Needed for a Successful Healthcare Transformation

Exceptional leadership skills are necessary for a healthcare organization to navigate the transformation from a paper-based organization to one that is data-enabled. Without good leadership, the organization risks not realizing the benefits of the transformation or not being transformed at all.

Indeed, organizations are spending millions of dollars on just the EHR part of the data enablement transformation and could be putting their investment at risk without proper executive leadership.

Big Data Needs the Big Three to Succeed

Big Data is a topic that is widely discussed (even by me). Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is that Big Data is only part of what is needed for a successful transition to become a data-enabled healthcare organization (DEHO). This is very similar to the early days of customer relationship management (CRM) when everyone was being told to “Buy my software and you’ll have CRM”. As we learned or should have learned from all the failed CRM implementations that littered the business landscape, a successful CRM implementation requires more than just installing new software. In the CRM implementation vision I co-developed back then, we identified three continuums that must equally be changed for a successful transition. This vision was selected by Gartner as one of the top three in the industry and has become the foundation for most successful CRM implementations still today.