HIT Execs Rank Their Top Data Challenges

What are the top data challenges for healthcare organizations these days? According to one new survey, understanding the nuances of data analytics, and budget and resource constraints around data initiatives, are the two most important issues in this area.

The research, conducted online by CTG, included responses from 85 CIOs, CMIOs and CTOs—the vast majority from provider organizations, and all members of CHIME (the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives).

Survey results indicated that turning healthcare data into clinical and operational insights remains a complicated endeavor, despite any number of analytics offerings on the market.

Specifically, according to survey respondents, their five most important data challenges, ranked, are: 1) analytics; 2) doing more with less (budget and resource constraints); 3) master data management; 4) data quality; and 5) addressing data siloes. The same five categories were also listed as the top five most urgent data challenges, with some variation in order of priority.

Drilling down further, respondents were asked to rank the importance of each data challenge on a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 signifying not as important and 10 highly important. The weighted average of the top challenge—understanding, selecting, and using the appropriate tools needed for analytics—was 8.13; the average for the second most pressing issue—doing more with less—was 8.04. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) was ranked as the least most important data challenge, with a 4.97 weighted  average. 

Meanwhile, the top three IT challenges were cited as 1) data quality and governance; 2) lack of personnel and resources; and 3) self-service reporting and analytics.

When asked which technology respondents use for enterprise information management, Microsoft (used by 77 percent of those surveyed) was by far the leader, followed by Tableau (used by 26 percent).