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thanks for joining us. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week Health, A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Welcome to our briefing campaign on modernizing the healthcare data platform with CDW Healthcare's leaders in this space, Lee Pierce and Rex Washburn.

Today is episode one, How Modern Data Platforms Are Enhancing the Healthcare Experience. This podcast series is going to culminate with an excellent webinar panel discussion with experts talking about how to modernize your healthcare data platform, the right fit for every unique health system. That's gonna be on Wednesday, December 7th.

Check out this weekhealth.com/webinars and click on the link to go ahead and register. We wanna thank our sponsors, Sirius CDW, and Health Catalyst for making this content possible. Now onto the show.

This is the. Of a five part series of talking about the modern healthcare data platform and looking forward to the discussion with with Rex and Lee. Today we're gonna talk about just that whole sentence there, speed to outcomes and value for your healthcare data platform. Lee let's start with you. Outcomes that healthcare cares about. What are some of those outcomes that healthcare cares about?

Yeah. Usually when we talk about outcomes, the data and analytics should, should deliver, and ultimately a modern data platform should deliver. We look at the Institute for Healthcare improvements in their quadruple aim, and that is better care, lower cost, better patient experience, and better clinician experience. If you think about how data is going to be used to, to really improve any of those four elements those are the outcomes and ultimately the value that healthcare organizations are going after, most everything, every project that is going to need data can map back to one of those.

And if you stay focused on those and you're always looking for what is the real value that that we're going after related to changing a clinical or business process, it should map back to one of those four elements of the, of IHIs. Quadruple aime.

Yeah. Rex, I wanna come to you to talk about speed a little bit. The pandemic showed that we can move. fast, yeah. It, it can move fast. But in this data space, man, we've seen some real advances. Give us an idea of speed to value. How are we seeing speed to value, and what is that conversation about?

So I think Speed value is what I'm seeing is health core organizations are embracing cloud, multi-cloud, and all the native tools, SAS offerings that they bring to bear. So that automatically speeds things up compared to the way the more legacy data platforms we used to go, we used to go after. Also, the technology has just changed so radically. So the higher speed data processing platforms, all three clouds plus a handful of extra vendors have them.

We have data virtualization data fabric coming about so that we can actually unify data faster. And then ML is making our lives a lot easier. So tasks that took a lot longer and a lot more effort. Everything from how do I pull data together to how do I govern data? I mean, ML is showing up in the tooling, in the clouds in all cases so that it's the old buy versus build.

And I think right now, We're seeing that embracing these modern vendors and the ity of the modern data stack or modern data platform is really what's driving that speed to value.

So we're not, we're not building these anymore. We're not going into the data center and, and loading these things up or is all of it cloud or is it, is it sort of a hybrid of both?

It can, it can be hybrid. I mean, it's really, it's what is the use case? What is your infrastructure going to support, What are your teams going to support? What are from a cost perspective, cloud is not always cheapest, Right? So we have to sort of balance those elements out. But usually what I'm seeing is it's a range now for multi-cloud and that.

Everything from the, all the different SaaS vendors, the that are out there that are just pervasive from CRMs, other platforms, EHRs, all the way through. I need to have a set of data on premise and I'm, but I'm gonna unify that and rest it in a cloud-based platform. So it's the full range, but you know, you can get started so much faster now.

It's literally a I have a cloud subscription. I use automation to configure that entire cloud through Terraform or whatnot. And then I start building you leveraging cloud native services to. Landing my data and analyzing it on day five. Right. You have the speed now to be able to get a modern data platform built out in a matter of weeks instead of the months, and sometimes years it took in live with legacy platforms.

So that is the beauty of the, of the cloud with your credit card. Mm-hmm. and internet connection. You could, you could be off to the races. Modern healthcare data platform is the last part of this sentence. So speed to outcomes and value for your Modern healthcare data platform. Let's break that down. What is the modern healthcare data platform?

So, defining the healthcare part of this and what we're, we're seeing with many of our provider customers specifically. The modern healthcare data platform really is an application of principles and best practices for what a modern data platform is, but making that real in healthcare.

And Rex can speak to what a modern data platform is in general. But the way that plays out in healthcare organizations is typically it's looking at the landscape of application vendors that an organization has chosen especially their EHR vendor. And the first step is in understanding are you leveraging as fully as possible what the EHR vendor has already provided related to access to data reporting and associated analytics?

But then we go beyond that to say, Plus the EHR plus and the plus part of. Is augmenting with tools and technologies and best practices that are all about taking a modern data platform approach to managing, integrating, and leveraging your data.

So clearly in healthcare we talk about the ehr, but there a plethora of systems. Mm-hmm. and now there's a plethora of systems outside. So give us the foundation for a modern healthcare data platform.

So foundation is, there's cloud somewhere in it, , whether that's multi-cloud or all the way to hybrid. But we need that for the agility and speed. The other elements are, are really the the modularity of it.

So we wanna be able to bring best of breed vendors in and then be able to swap them out, right? So if we're not seeing the performance or the management costs or, or whatnot of a platform or a tool within the stack, we need to be able to swap that out. And we need to be able to do it without a high exit tax. So if I think of some of the older monolithic technologies, extracting ourselves from them could cost a lot, right?

So I need to be able to swap things in and out in as agile a way as possible based upon the need. And if I acquire a new hospital or a new clinic or whatnot, and they have a better technology, I need to be able to integrate that faster than ever before. So that's really the hallmark of modern data. Leveraging the cloud SAS vendors to be able to move quickly and adapt in a marketplace that is changing so rapidly. It just keeps our heads spinning.

So Lee, I'm gonna give you the last word on this. With healthcare adopting modern healthcare or modern data platforms what are some of the characteristics of those organizations once they adopt that modern data platform for healthcare? What are some of the characteristics? What are some of the things we start to see from those organizations?

one of the key things that you see is being able to tie. Value to a specific clinical or business process. So it's, it's the speed to which that you can actually get the data together, be able to work together with the clinical or business areas that that need the data, and that you actually get to that result in a way that, that you can, you can measure what the impact is.

That, that in the end is a hallmark of a mature data approach as well as the use of what comes out of that is can you actually measure the results? from a clinical or financial perspective. And just the ability to do that quicker and quicker to be able to iterate quicker and quicker than we ever were able to previously.

It's not, it's not months at a time that you come up with an idea and then you can get the outcome. it should take days and weeks at the longest to be able to, to be able to see that. So I think that's probably the the main thing that I see from a healthcare organization if they're applying these principles.

And there's a lot that has to come along with that, but that's, that's the outcome. That's your ability that you can measure that and it, and you can do that quicker across more areas than you were able to previously.

Yeah. The faster you can iterate, the more you can get done. We're gonna break this down. In the next couple of episodes. We're gonna talk about leveraging best practices, understanding. Data fabric and virtualization. We're gonna talk about the data quality challenges and we're gonna talk about data governance as well. So really look forward to the conversation as we move forward. Rex and Lee, thank you. Thanks for great conversation. Thank you. Look forward to look forward to more.

Thanks Bill. 📍 Bill, definitely.

What a great discussion I wanna thank our sponsors for today's Serious CDW and Health Catalyst for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders Don't forget that this whole series ends with a great webinar on Wednesday December 7th Lee Pearson Rex Washburn will be joining us along with Jared Nunez Executive Director Informatics and Analytics at Memorial Care We're gonna take this discussion one step further by including you and your questions So go ahead and register at this week health.com The link is in the top right hand corner and don't forget to drop your questions in the form so we can make sure 📍 to cover In the webinar Looking forward to that discussion Thanks for listening That's all for now