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The Importance of Starting with a Mission-Driven Healthcare Data Strategy
Feb 17, 2023

Organizations involved in healthcare quality improvement and research for treatments and cures are increasingly developing capabilities to use data to advance their initiatives. Many organizations fall into the trap of focusing too much on the selection of tools for immediate projects, losing sight of where their data strategy needs to go. To truly move your organization forward you need to keep a mission-driven healthcare data strategy front and center. Put a strategy in place before you build your registry so you can ensure you’re able to meet your organization’s current analytics needs, while still having the flexibility to adjust to future uses.


Identify Data Objectives

This step may seem simple, but in order to select the right registry solutions, you need to clearly identify the objectives for not only your current initiatives, but the organization’s overall goal. For example, healthcare organizations have often focused on a QCDR-only approach for CMS reporting. This limits their registry’s potential and constrains their ability to meet new challenges and opportunities.

Start with defining the loftiest goals for your organization’s work. Think big and consider your larger goals. Evaluate and plan for new challenges and opportunities. From there, look at:

  • Verifiable measures of success
  • Specific tactics and goals and descriptions of what those achievements will look like
  • The tools and resources needed, including a registry, to render your raw data into comprehensible, accurate, timely, and reliable information to move your goals forward
  • If you already have a registry for a current initiative, determine if/how closely your current solution is enabling your goals and larger mission
  • Develop a gap analysis to inform your next direction

The single most important way to continue toward having a mission-driven healthcare strategy is having the tools to advance that mission, ensuring that your data sources can be used effectively to support your key goals now and in the future.


The Right Technologies for a Mission-Driven Healthcare Data Strategy

After conducting an assessment of your organization’s overall goals and current information needs—as well as the systems and structures available—it’s time to choose a registry platform. All projects and initiatives can change as you learn and goals evolve or expand, so it’s important to choose solutions that will support your mission over time.

There are some essential things to look for when choosing a health data platform that will grow with your organization. Make sure it can:

  • Bring together data from a wide variety of disparate sources: clinical research, care delivery, existing registries, social determinants, and patient reported/generated information to create a meaningful picture of human health to drive measurement and feedback
  • Ensure the quality level for each piece of data with robust quality control and quality assurance mechanisms that flag problematic data as it arrives
  • Deliver analytic datasets that are cleaned and organized for each data use from annual reporting to the community, to risk adjustment analyses, to comparative effectiveness research
  • Allow easy reuse of the data for new purposes and to launch new registry initiatives

Your healthcare registry platform should be your most versatile—and most valuable—tool for empowering your mission and advancing the state of care in your specialty or patient community.


Develop a Data Team

Although tools are critical to transforming raw data into easily-digestible information that supports your organization’s initiatives; tools (and systems) alone will not advance your mission.

Arguably one of the most obvious but overlooked steps to setting up a mission-driven data strategy is to develop teams that are solely focused on data, especially for smaller organizations new to deploying registries. Most young organizations struggle to scale up with the appropriate staff and analytical resources. By changing the macro environment, you are changing perceptions about the importance of transforming data into truly usable information. Information is now seen as an integral and important component of your organization’s strategy—feeding into your overall mission. Improving healthcare quality and patient outcomes requires trustworthy and actionable data. But no amount of data can substitute for the right vision and guidance. With your mission prominent in your planning, you’ll be able choose a good team and flexible platform for your healthcare improvement initiative.


See if you have the amount and quality of data you need for your initiative with our step-by-step guide

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