Does Your Data Architecture Align with Employees’ Needs?
Healthcare payors by nature are data rich businesses, but not all organizations are equipped with the means to leverage that data. The unstructured nature and variable quality of modern data stockpiles make harnessing insights difficult unless your organization has been meticulous and intentional about designing your data analytics user experience. Does your analytical platform empower employees to lower costs, streamline operations, and improve patient outcomes? Ask these questions to learn if your data architecture fosters data-driven decision making.
Is Your Data Centralized and Secure?
Imagine one of your employees wants to generate a report. Whether the objective is to predict at-risk members in need of preventive care or identify epicenters of claim inaccuracies within your organization, that employee will likely depend upon data spread across systems and divisions. When the data they need is siloed and segmented, reporting and advanced analytics activities will lag and suffer from incomplete or inaccurate insights.
As a healthcare payor, it is important to take pause as you rebuild your data architecture into a consolidated data lake for your structured and unstructured data. Though a centralized data repository is more conducive to real-time and perceptive reporting, making electronic healthcare records too available threatens your business with HIPAA and HITECH Act violations. To achieve equilibrium between accessibility and security, it is crucial to adopt data security policies, access controls, and an ongoing data management solution that regulate access without being too restrictive.
Is Your Employee Interface Intuitive?
The ability of your employees to aggregate diverse data and extract insight depends just as heavily on the intuitiveness of your interface. Can users easily set the parameters of their reports? Are the results decipherable? Are they able to visualize data for presentations to decision makers? The more your data platform provides satisfying answers to these questions, the more usable it will be for employees of varying technical acumen.
In fact, the technical capability of your users is another key consideration. Data dashboards that anticipate users’ needs and grasp their technical knowledge will foster smoother data input, report generation, and data interpretation.
Does Data Governance Support Your Data Architecture?
Even with an impressive data infrastructure in place, your employees will be underserved unless there is strong data governance in place to match it. Data governance provides the rules, policies, and protocols to ensure that data quality is maintained at the highest level. Your data architecture is only a piece of the larger puzzle.
Why exactly is data governance important? Consider this scenario. One of your employees is running a report on which strategies are better at increasing consumer engagement (a top priority for 80% of healthcare payors) and finds that certain files consistently contain blank cells. If that person subjects those files to a data cleansing process without reporting the problem down the line, that problem will likely continue to occur and taint subsequent reports with bad data. By establishing a comprehensive data governance strategy alongside your data architecture, your organization will not only be more accurate with your analyses but more nimble in correcting problems.
Want to ensure your data architecture empowers your employees to generate strategic insight capable of transforming your business? Contact us to maximize your data’s potential.
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