Data and digital transformation in healthcare

Never in history was data and digital transformation as significant as today. Healthcare providers struggle to fulfil all demands for care with the available (human) resources. However, increasing resources is often impossible because of insufficient funds. Therefore, the use and reuse of digital information are critical targets to make healthcare sustainable in the future.

Digital strategy

A digital strategy is often the first step. What is the big picture for the organisation? How do we interact with patients in the future? Healthcare is a people business, but digital will play an essential role in this business. Data and digital transformation will determine which organisations will succeed in the future.

Coverton can help you to develop a digital strategy for your healthcare organisation. A good strategy will provide guidance to all levels of the organisation. For example, it allows executives to make the right choice when investing and helps explain why confident decisions are made.

Data management

Collecting data and storing it is the easy part. Morse’s law makes it relatively easy to collect more and more data, and as long as storage prices decrease, organisations will continue to collect data for future use. Although this practice is based on good intentions, in many organisations, it results in a data swamp instead of a data lake. In a lake, you can easily spot where the big fish are. The big fish remain undetected in a swamp even when they are next to you.

The data collections of many healthcare organisations experience the same unclarity as a swamp. This unclarity is very expensive in healthcare. In addition, diagnoses are delayed because the data that could trigger early detections are not linked. This example is just one of the many implications of suboptimal data management. Organisations, in general, underestimate the total impact of mediocre data management.

Insights from data

When you manage your data well, it becomes easier to transform data into insights. But the search for wisdom is a bit like a treasure quest. Many people attempt to gain insights from data sets, but a small group is capable of finding the most relevant insights. Just like archaeologists do not start to dig holes at random, data scientists do not begin to make random charts. Instead, it is a structured process where we confirm or reject hypotheses in each step. The good thing about a process is that we can help you learn how it works.