Eric Williams, MD, is the system chief quality officer at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston.
His responsibilities include improving the quality of care for patients as well as ensuring their clinical data and information is secure. Here, Dr. Williams outlines his views on data management and where big tech partnerships will be most helpful.
Question: What are the top data management challenges you hope to solve in the next 12 to 24 months?
Eric Williams: Arguably, the greatest challenges are keeping up with the explosive volume of new data created — whether or not [that data] is needed is a different story — and the difficulty in getting it rapidly into the hands of the people who would most benefit in knowing it or having access to it.
Q: What is your organizational approach to clinical or patient data registries, and how do you make sure you are getting the right data input?
EW: We are attempting to effectively move away from the phenomenon whereby all data requests, and/or all populations of patient's data needs are equal, to one in which there is a natural prioritization that focuses on embedding value — for example quality and cost — into the process. There is simply no easy way to scale the current needs.
Q: As healthcare organizations partner with more vendors and collect an increasing amount of patient data, how do you ensure patient data is secure?
EW: Our information security and information technology program is extremely risk-averse and has very rigid controls in place on the front end before we share any data. You are right in that everybody wants to be in the patient data business. Presently, the data protection standards are weighted such that the risk of data breach is on the shoulders of the healthcare organizations. More of the risk should be owned by the vendors, or the vendor subcontractors or the sub-subcontractors.
Q: What do you think are the most interesting opportunities for partnering with big tech companies currently or in the future?
EW: Healthcare, routinely behind other industries, has often attacked problems by assuming they have to — or are the only ones who can — grow their own talent. But in a world that continues to change more rapidly, that strategy can no longer keep up. It would be foolish to consider 'competing' with the likes of the current tech giants who wield incredible coding and innovative firepower. It may happen in pockets in certain medical centers, but it cannot happen at scale.
New and novel partnerships will have to be developed in an agile fashion and also function in an agile fashion. Healthcare historically does not routinely function in an agile fashion, and the data science and tech companies are not going to wait around very long for healthcare to change. Quickly, the tech coders need to be connected at the hip with the content experts in medicine, right there next to the patient. That will better solve the right problems.