Survey: Only 20 Percent of Healthcare Executives Trust Their Data

On Oct. 14, Baltimore, Md.-based Sage Growth Partners, a health consultancy company, commissioned by the Cambridge, Mass.-based InterSystems, a healthcare data technology provider, released a survey of 100 healthcare executives entitled, “Bad Data, Bad Analytics, Bad Decisions: New survey of healthcare executives finds underlying data issues still plague analytics and decision-making.”

The survey found that leaders are continuing to face challenges in collecting, normalizing, analyzing, and using data to make timely clinical decisions. “Despite widespread adoption of electronic data, most executives say that they still lack data they can trust to drive good analytics and meet their strategic priorities,” the survey states. “And over half of survey respondents say that these issues negatively impact their ability to make decisions, identify gaps in care, optimize the revenue cycle, and meet quality metrics.”

Key findings from the survey include:

• Eighty-five percent of respondents said they view analytics priorities as fundamental to achieving their broader strategic objectives
• Twenty percent responded that they fully trust their data
• Sixty-four percent say it is somewhat credible
• Fifty-one percent report that data integration and interoperability are the most significant barrier to achieving their strategic priorities related to data analytics
• More than half say data quality has serious consequences:
• Leading to ineffective or slow decision making (53 percent)
• The inability to identify gaps in care (50 percent)
• Eighty percent say creating and sharing high-quality data across their organizations is a top strategic priority for analytics in the next 12 months
• Eighty-four percent say creating and sharing high-quality data across their organizations is a top strategic priority for analytics in the next 36 months
• Eighty-five percent say real-time and harmonized data is crucial for key stakeholders to make informed operational decisions

Sage Growth Partners surveyed 100 leaders of acute hospitals and health systems with at least 250 beds and was conducted in the summer of 2021. Sixty-nine percent surveyed are members of the C-suite and 31 percent are VPs or directors.

The survey concludes that “Clearly, healthcare executives continue to need better solutions that can integrate a broad array of data in a timely, digestible, and accessible format. Making reliable data visible across the organization for different users to get what they need from a single source of truth is essential to achieving the goals HCOs [healthcare organizations] have set for themselves. Without that, it’s much harder to close care gaps, optimize clinical and business performance, and track, report and improve value.”

The full report can be accessed here.