Survey Says: Healthcare CIOs Don’t Fully Trust Their Data

by | Nov 8, 2018 | Healthcare

Reading Time: 3 minutes

What is the state of trust in data within healthcare organizations? And how much data is easily accessible to decision-makers? Dimensional Insight recently set out to answer these and other questions by surveying healthcare chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders.

Tweet: Survey says: Healthcare CIOs don’t fully trust their data

The survey probed three realms within healthcare organizations: clinical, financial, and operational. Overall, it found few organizations have very strong trust in their data while levels of self-service vary across the enterprise. The survey also revealed that most healthcare organizations plan to invest money toward improving both data trust and self-service. Here is a closer look at the results.

What we asked

The company surveyed 85 members of a professional organization for CIOs and other senior healthcare IT leaders in August 2018. Respondents were asked four questions about their organizations’ clinical, financial, and operational data:

  • How would you rate the index of trust in data within your various user communities, on a 1-10 scale, with 10 being the highest? The index of trust was defined as how strongly “user populations believe that they can trust the data provided to make decisions.”
  • What percentage of your user population would you consider to be self-serviced in making data-driven decisions?
  • Do you plan to increase or decrease your investment toward improving data trust?
  • Do you plan to increase or decrease your investment toward self-service analytics?

What we learned

Survey results indicate that less than half of CIOs have strong trust in their data. Findings include:

  • 48% of respondents assessed financial data as an 8 or above on the 10-point scale. The percentage of “8-and-up” responses was 40% for clinical and 36% for operational.
  • Clinical users have the lowest levels of self-service in making data-driven decisions. More than half of CIOs report that 30% or less of their clinical population is self-serviced in data-driven decision making.
  • Approximately three-quarters of healthcare organizations plan to increase investments to improve trust in data and self-service capabilities.

 

 

Investment plans

It appears healthcare organizations recognize the vast room for improvement. Most plan to invest funds toward increasing data trust and the penetration of self-service.

The investment questions invited three possible responses: “yes,” “no,” and “stay the same.” At least 70% responded “yes” to investments in trusted data in each of the three realms. In addition, most organizations (68 – 78%) plan to increase their investments toward improving users’ capacity for self-service data analytics. Only 1 or 2% plan to decrease investments.

Why it matters

Dimensional Insight believes trusted data is more important than ever, as healthcare organizations migrate from the fee-for-service model to value-based care. During this transition, healthcare organizations must weigh investments, risks, and tradeoffs against quantitative, trustworthy data. This kind of data driven decision-making will be critical in shaping the initiatives and high-stakes choices required by value-based care.

Self-service capabilities matter for both content and context. Self-service applications allow users to work with the data that is the most germane to their objectives and to put it in the proper context. In short, working only from standardized reports limits the power of data analytics.

Takeaways

This survey demonstrates that healthcare organizations have a long way to go in developing rock-solid trust in their data and self-service access to it. It appears executives are aware of these challenges and are ready to dedicate resources to improving both trust and access.

Learn more

Ready for a test drive of our healthcare analytics software?

Laura Remington

You may also like