Neerav Patel is the healthcare and analytics leader at DXC Technology Americas.
Mr. Patel will moderate a DXC-sponsored customer panel discussion, “DATA - The Beating Heart of the Healthcare Ecosystem" at Becker's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies Conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference on Oct. 4-7 in Chicago. To learn more about the conference, click here.
The DXC-sponsored distinguished DXC customer panel will feature John T. Mason, Senior Vice President & CIO at Quorum Health, Brett MacLaren, Senior Vice President, Data & Analytics at Kaiser Permanente, and Edward S. Kim, MD, MBA, FACP, FASCO, Physician-in-Chief & Senior Vice President, City of Hope OC, Vice Physician-in-Chief & Professor, City of Hope NMC. Discussions will center around the current state of their data journey at their respective organizations', how COVID-19 affected their data strategies, challenges in data and future key data initiatives.
Becker's Healthcare aims to foster peer-to-peer conversation between healthcare's brightest leaders and thinkers. In that vein, responses to our Speaker Series are published straight from interviewees. Here are some perspectives shared by Neerav, the DXC Executive Round Table moderator.
Question: What has been the current state of the healthcare data strategy?
Neerav Patel: The last few years have seen once disjointed technologies around data integration, cloud, analytics, and AI come together in a unified architecture driving key business strategies to leverage data and analytics to streamline operations, scale up and quickly adapt to changing caregiver, patient and member needs.
The pandemic further brought a heightened focus on 'Agile Transformation' like no other event in the past. Data agility and quality are underpinning the progress of key initiatives underway across the industry ecosystem – from accelerating telemedicine and regulatory compliance to enabling decentralized clinical trials.
Q: What challenges do you anticipate over the next three years?
NP: The US has one of the most complex industry ecosystems, and various segments continue to struggle to make data collaboration seamless, especially in light of the ever-changing policy and regulatory framework coupled with amplified consumerization. Getting to a unified standard and common rails of moving data across the industry will remain a heavy lift. The security posture and threat of cyber-attacks, fraud, and abuse are persistent challenges that must be tackled head-on.
Q: What strategic direction do you see organizations continue or pivot to make the most of their data investments?
NP: Some of the current trends will accelerate, drawing from further advancement of cloud & AI technology, with the most meaningful build-out around topics such as social determinants of health (SDOH), risk population segmentation, disease progression modeling, and real-time next best action initiatives around a variety of use cases.
Organizations will do well to focus on data metabolism — the ability to serve up relevant data and insights at the right time and speed to the right people — an effort that would require looking at data with a strategic lens across organization structure, business and technology.