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 If you are interested in learning about Salesforce, I suggest you go to the Trailhead site ASAP. The training is absolutely free and it is a fantastic resource. 

I have earned over 100 badges (many of them during the pandemic), and I have recently reached Expeditioner status! Next stop, Ranger!

Data, Fancy Charts, and Healthcare

2019 will be known for many things (not just Baby Yoda). One of the key acquisitions this year was Salesforce acquiring Tableau for 15.7B dollars. Yes B for billions.

What does this mean for healthcare? Data has sometimes been a pain point in healthcare: how can massive amounts of data be transformed into ways that can lead to decisions? That's the million (or billion) dollar question. Add in financial constraints plus data security issues and this further complicates the problem.

Data in healthcare will continue to be a hot topic into the 2020's. As the amount of data continues to grow from terabytes to petabytes, the key will be about how healthcare leaders will be able to use this data to make key decisions to allow their organization to move forward.

USC Marshall Healthcare Conference 2016

For friends in the Healthcare Industry in Southern California, check out information on USC Marshall's Healthcare Conference 2016. Titled, "Healthcare 2030: A Vision for the Future". The conference is this Friday, March 4th in Los Angeles:

Past conferences have featured speakers such as healthcare finance leaders, large hospitals C-level executives, and regulatory compliance directors of Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies. With an impressive panel of speakers, this event is sure to get you thinking about where healthcare is headed next! See you on the 4th of March at The Radisson USC at 8:00am.

Find more details and updates at: uscmarshallhcc.com

IBM Watson: Empowering the "Citizen Data Scientists"

With healthcare's increased amount of data and lack of data scientists, IBM Watson has a plan to empower "citizen data scientists" to close the gap. IBM believes that it can offer a solution to the skills shortage by cutting out the data scientists and replacing or supplementing them with its Watson natural language analytics platform.

With data analysis such a crucial part of almost every job in the 21st century, democratizing data analysis may be the answer. Dr. Bob Hoyt, director of health informatics at the University of West Florida, who has been working with Watson for some time, says “In my classes I have doctors, nurses, pharmacists, healthcare administrators – who mainly don’t have a background in statistics or computer science, so when it comes to analytics – either statistical or data mining – they have to turn to other people.

“What appeals to me is that I don’t have to spend two hours explaining a statistical test and have everybody fall asleep, then run the data – I can literally run it, get the results, click a hyperlink to explore the statistical details, and discuss them.”

Dr Hoyt introduces students to working with Watson Analytics on his graduate and undergraduate Current Topics in Healthcare course, and began by asking them to experiment with and query anonymized data on asthma.

For more information on how IBM is empowering the citizen data scientist: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/02/29/how-ibm-is-hoping-to-close-the-massive-big-data-and-analytics-skills-gap/#7ba8bd4210f6

Tableau's Approach to BI within Healthcare

Tableau is the most highly rated business intelligence tool for analysis and visualization in the market today. But is it the right tool to use in the healthcare industry?

Tableau's primary mission is to help people see and understand their data quickly and easily.  This is a  great fit for the healthcare industry as it has never been more focused on data as it is today. Healthcare is known for its large amount of (mostly unstructured) data that has been sometimes been more overwhelming than helpful.

The three attributes of the new way that decision makers in healthcare are approaching analytics healthcare analytics are an emphasis on:

1. Self-Reliance 
2. Visual Discovery 
3. Speed At Every Stage 

This aligns perfectly with Tableau's mission making Tableau the ideal BI tool!

For more information, read this full report on "Why Tableau for Healthcare":

http://www.crgroup.com/Products/Documents/Why%20Tableau%20for%20Healthcare.pdf

Criteria for Evaluating Business Intelligence Tools in Healthcare

Should you be using SAS, Tableau, or Cloudera? Here are criteria when evaluating the correct Business Intelligence Tools in Healthcare:

• Evaluate your Use Cases: It isn't about the best tool, it is about the best tool for the job. So create some actual use cases of how the tools will be used and see which tool(s) are best for those particular scenarios.
• Data Structure: Data analysts love analyzing data, not transforming data. So keep your data types and structure in mind when choosing your BI tools.
• Financial Considerations: This is probably more important in healthcare than other industries as many healthcare organizations are nonprofit and/or may have a smaller IT budget than in other industries. Sometimes cost is a primary driver when selecting the right tool for your organization.

Anything else I might be missing? Check out this article for more information on this topic: 

https://www.healthcatalyst.com/Evaluating-Business-Intelligence-Tool-for-Healthcare

Does your Healthcare Organization have a Business Intelligence Strategy?

It makes perfect sense: healthcare is known to have "the most complex data of any industry". Business intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau, Cloudera, etc. are meant to help aggregate and visualize complex data. Healthcare and BI should be a match made in heaven right?

According to a recent report by Gartner, "many health systems are still struggling to gain top executive commitment, justify the investment, build strong information governance and settle on an approach.” 

Read more about business intelligence trends in healthcare and in other industries:

• https://www.healthcatalyst.com/healthcare-business-intelligence-data-warehouse
• http://get.tableau.com/top-10-trends-business-intelligence-2016.html

iWatch: Healthcare Disappointment?

In a recent article published by Forbes Magazine, business strategy advisor Chunka Mui wonders what happened to all of the "game-changing" healthcare features which Apple once promised? Although there will be the connection to the HealthKit app, the recent Apple Keynote which featured the iWatch was relatively hush in terms of health benefits promised by the new device. Once expected to be a glucose monitor/blood pressure monitor/other medical device killer all-in-one, the presentation focused on the aesthetics of the device.

So although it may be too early to say that the Apple watch is a total failure in terms of its application to health care, it is safe to assume that there is a way to go before the iWatch becomes the wearable device killer that it was originally touted to be. Your move, Tim Cook.

Driving Innovation in the Healthcare Industry Conference

For those interested in Healthcare and driving innovation within the Healthcare industry, USC is hosting the

2015 Healthcare Conference entitled: “TRANSFORMING CARE: Driving Innovation in the Healthcare Industry”.

This conference will be held on Friday, March 6th 2015 and will feature keynote speakers from Amgen, Mayo Clinic, and LAC/USC Medical Center.

For more information, go to http://uscmarshallhcc.com/.

Aprevita for Healthcare Analytics just raised $18M

Apervita just raised $18M in venture capital funding. Their mission is ambitious: to "make algorithms related to disease and treatment available to care providers in roughly the same way that iTunes makes songs available to music fans." 

The types of analytics Apervita will provide will help providers (as well as pharmaceutical companies) analyze risk and remain in compliance.

On www.apervita.com, the company describes itself as "the secure self-service platform that enables any health professional to connect health datasets, author evidence-based algorithms and measures, share them, and publish to a marketplace."

Barriers to Healthcare Analytics

According to the Copley Consulting Group, although business analytics can help healthcare providers and payers create actionable insights, there are oftentimes barriers to the use of analytics in healthcare.

These barriers include:

• The sheer volume of data
• Culture does not encourage sharing information
• Lack of understanding how to use analytics to improve the business
• Lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Lack of skills internally in the line of business

But as the article states, even with these barriers healthcare organizations that fail to effectively use analytics will fall behind. The massive improvements to clinical and business processes outweigh the barriers of implementing analytics.

Your Very Own "Personal Healthcare Companion in the Near Future?

Imagine a personalized robot with a soothing voice that can diagnose a wide variety of healthcare issues and recommend the best possible care? Sounds like science fiction?  Well maybe not for long.

In case you missed it, the number one movie in America is Disney's "Big Hero 6".  This movie stars a lovable robot named Baymax described as a "healthcare providing robot nurse".  Amazingly, the concept for the movies healthcare robot came from actual research in robotics done at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Personalized Diagnosis from a robot?

Carnegie Mellon had developed an inflatable robotic arm that inspired the design of Baymax.  This use of "soft robotics" (made of soft materials) offer advantages over metallic robots especially in terms of safety when operating near people in a healthcare environment.  For more information about CMU's research in soft robotics, click this link or watch the YouTube video.

How Lack of Metrics Sunk Healthcare.gov

It has been well documented that the initial launch of healthcare.gov was a disaster.  This great article in forbes.com diagnoses some of the main reasons why, focusing on their lack of strong project management.

Error Rate report for healthcare.gov established AFTER launch

The rules of project management broken are as follows:

1. Unrealistic requirements
2. Technical complexity
3. Integration responsibility
4. Fragmented authority
5. Loose metrics
6. Inadequate testing
7. Aggressive schedules
8. Administrative blindness

Usually, just one of these mistakes could spell disaster for a project.  But the 8 of them combined lead to utter failure.

But since this an analytics blog, lets focus on metrics: "The government said in a report released on Sunday that it has made “improvements in the site’s key operating metrics over the last several weeks,” which is a tacit admission that it didn’t initially have adequate ways of measuring progress."

Without establishing these proper metrics from the beginning, how would government officials know that the schedule was too aggressive?  Or that the requirements were unrealistic?  The answer:  they had no clue.

I believe that since these metrics were not established from the beginning of the project, this led to a snowball affect that ultimately led to one of the worst "go-live's" in the history of project management.  Lesson moving forward for healthcare, government, and any complex project:

1. define operating metrics in detail from the beginning.
2. determine how these metrics will be communicated to stakeholders.

Too little, too late, this report was released detailing the newly instituted metrics for healthcare.gov.  If these metrics were prioritized by the project team and instituted from early on in the project, we would be discussing the healthcare.gov launch in an entirely different way today.

IBM Watson to help with clinical trials recruitment

As a project manager who works in clinical research, I know how important patient recruitment is for successful clinical trials. IBM’s recent partnership with Mayo Clinic to leverage IBM Watson’s cognitive analytics abilities to match patients with the appropriate clinical trials is a potential game-changer in the research community where many trials fail due to lack of enrollment.

Clinical trials recruitment is an vital aspect of research. For you statistics nerds, you know that by having a higher "n" (population size), you will have a greater confidence level (better results). Well sometimes, clinical trials do not have the "n" that they would like for their study so need to recruit additional participants.

“Matching is such a hard and cumbersome process,” Sean Hogan, IBM vice president of healthcare told Fox News. For anyone who has worked in clinical trials recruitment, they will tell you that this is a very manual, data-driven process. I have worked first hands with principal investigator's and know that recruitment takes so many man hours that could be better served on actual research. And in worst case scenario's some research studies can fail due to not recruiting enough participants.

If IBM can leverage cognitive analytics to help automate this manual process, this will mean a higher population size for clinical trials and lead to better results. Definitely a good thing as research moves forward into the 21st century.

How the Apple/IBM partnership will impact mobile health IT

How does this partnership impact mobile health?

This summer, both the business and the tech world were buzzing as IBM and Apple announced that they were forming a partnership.  While this obviously means big changes on the enterprise front, how does this partnership (if at all) impact mobile healthcare IT?

1. Security:  EMR's and mobile health have long been plagued by concerns of lack of data security.  With HIPAA compliance and PHI (Patient Health Information) concerns at the forefront, this Apple/IBM partnership could potentially address issues of data security that have stood in the way of the expansion of mobile healthcare usage and development.  The deal calls for IBM to build a suite of platforms and apps that will transport healthcare data securely from the bedside to Apple devices.
2. Epic's "MyChart" App:  Apple has a partnership with Kaiser's EMR, Epic Systems.  This deal will bring data security and potentially increased usage of Epic's mobile application on Apple devices.
3. Apple's Healthkit:  Apple's iOS 8 to be released this fall will feature "Healthkit".  This will aggregate data brought in from fitness apps and activity trackers into one dashboard.  IBM has already been working on building healthcare applications for the iOS.



iOs8 Healthkit

4. Siri + Watson: The marriage of Siri and Watson used in a healthcare setting could potentially give physicians hands free computing and health data analysis as one of the prime applications of IBM's cognitive computing system.

In conclusion, this partnership definitely brings opportunity for dramatic change in the mobile Health IT space.  While we don't know exactly what will be released in terms of health care applications on the mobile devices, we do hope that IBM's increased security will alleviate security concerns of users and lead to increased adoption of mobile health.  

Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare

Bob Kocher, former Special Assistant to President Obama for Healthcare and Economic Policy once asked me:

"You are in healthcare?  Are you going to fix it?"

This is a great article on CIO.com that touches on the main points on why it is broken and what will be needed to one day fix it.

In the article it states that the problem can be boiled down to two issues:

1. Innovation has been sustaining as opposed to disruptive while the process remains largely centralized.
2. Hospitals offer the value of solving any problem for any patient, he says, but the overhead of that complexity leads to tremendous costs.

This reminds me of the debate when the large car manufacturers were bleeding money:  should the government subsidize them and get them back on their feet?  Or should the government let these automotive powerhouses die out and let nature take its course.

In the case of healthcare, disruption on this scale is necessary.  Although it will be painful for everyone at first, it is the only way to solve this massive problem long term.  No amount of band aids can fix the current healthcare system as is.  

Google Ventures largest investment in a medical tech startup

Google Ventures just invested $130M in Flatiron Health, a start-up that organizes real-time oncology data to help cancer patients and doctors.  Their flagship product, OncoAnalytics or OncologyCloud provides "World-class analytics and business intelligence for cancer care providers."

OncologyCloud by Flatiron Health

Flatiron Health, which launched in 2012 and is currently in beta, collects information by connecting cancer treatment center around the world on its cloud-based technology platform, with the goal of allowing researchers, physicians, and patients to learn from aggregated data collected from millions of cases. It hopes that this will allow doctors to provide better care and enable patients to make data-driven decisions.

Data driven decisions to better enable patients and lead to better outcomes?  Yes, please.

Cognitive Analytics: Top 10 Digital Tech Trend

Deloitte Consulting LLP recently released its "5th Annual Tech Trends Report".  In this report it lists its top 10 overall trends, keying on 5 disruptors (opportunities for technology executives to create sustainable positive changes in IT capabilities, business operations and business models) and 5 enablers (technologies in which many organizations have already invested, but new developments and opportunities have inspired new business applications, thereby warranting a fresh look).

Cognitive Analytics is listed as one of the Disruptors.  By definition Cognitive Analytics is a computing platform that combines artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and   massively parallel computing to drive rich insights that can aid real time decision making.  The video below shows Rajeev Ronanki, a principal at Deloitte, explaining how cognitive analytics is used in a business situation by a national healthcare plan to use big data to gain real insights.

New Entrants are Disruptive (in a good way)

Key points of how these new entrants are disrupting the Healthcare Industry per research by PwC:  

• Two dozen of 2013’s Fortune 50 companies are healthcare new entrants. Of those, seven are retailers; eight are technology and telecommunications companies. Venture capital is also pouring into health startups.
• Consumers are willing to abandon traditional care venues for more affordable and convenient alternatives, signaling threats to traditional healthcare organization revenues, according to an HRI consumer survey.
• New entrants will propel the democratization and decentralization of healthcare, allowing consumers to access care anywhere.
• Consumer interest in price and quality transparency has sown a new market being hotly contested by new entrants and traditional healthcare organizations alike.
• New players are reshaping and expanding the $267 billion US fitness and wellness industry, which presents rapid paths to market, abundant sources of data and opportunities to build new market segments.

IBM Watson goes to Africa

IBM Watson is perhaps the smartest computer on the planet.  It won Jeopardy and defeated the smartest humans on the planet.  But the big question so far has been.....

So what?

IBM Brings Watson to Africa

IBM is now attempting to parlay Watson to solve the greatest business and social challenges affecting the world.  "Project Lucy" will leverage Watson to use Big Data and "develop commercially viable solutions to Africa’s grand challenges in healthcare, education, water and sanitation, human mobility and agriculture."

WOW.

If anyone is going to pull it off, it would be great to bet on the company who introduced to the world computers and printers as well as producing a few Nobel Prize winners.  If you are interested, read more about Project Lucy here.