The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff

There is a bit of a trope about getting the Right Data, to the Right Person, at the Right Time as a way to describe the challenge of big data in healthcare analytics.

For us at Analytics Engines, it’s simply not good enough to gather, ingest, analyse and visualise the data- there has to be meaningful use and demonstrable outcome improvements to justify the effort. A current analytics project with a healthcare customer reminded me that the arbiter of what constitutes ‘Right’  is very much in the eye of the beholder. The ‘Right’ data for a surgeon is probably very different from that required by the General Practitioner, from Nurse Unit Manager, from Consultant Physician, and so on. All are involved in the care of the same patient and all accessing the same data-sets, hopefully presented on a universally accessible platform. At what point however should information systems be smart enough to parse the data so that only relevant info is presented, depending on who the user is, and at what stage of the patient care pathway. And naturally, this needs to be agile to accommodate changes in what the user wishes to do with the information. After all, the customer is always Right!