Data silos can decrease efficiency and increase annoyance. These silos can also have impacts outside hospital walls.
These 35 industry leaders explain how they're breaking down data silos.
The executives featured in this article are all speaking at the Becker's Health IT, Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting: The Future of Business and Clinical Technologies which will take place Oct. 3-6, 2023, at the Navy Pier in Chicago.
To learn more about this event, click here.
If you would like to join as a speaker, contact Randi Haseman at rhaseman@beckershealthcare.com.
As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who will speak at our conference. The following are answers from our speakers at the event.
Editor's note: These responses have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Question: How is your organization breaking down data silos to improve patient care?
Tina Esposito. System vice president and chief health information officer at Advocate Health (Charlotte, N.C.): At Advocate Health, we have embarked on a cloud journey to ensure appropriate and efficient access to data, regardless of where it is stored. This effort has been intentionally and deliberately partnered with a significant focus on data governance. Democratizing data is a huge technical hurdle, but that hard work can only be realized if the data is actually used.
Tarun Kapoor, MD, MBA. Senior vice president and chief digital transformation officer at Virtua Health (Marlton, N.J.): We believe most silos are not created with intention, rather unintentionally because of misaligned goals and tactics. Yes, good data governance, architecture and engineering are all critical, but having a north star on what we’re trying to accomplish with the data goes a long way to decrease misalignment, and the associated silos, before they form.
Daniel Barchi. Senior executive vice president and CIO at CommonSpirit Health (Chicago): We are a large healthcare system and data best serves our patient care mission when it is accessible and standardized on the needs of our operators and clinicians. We are breaking down silos from below and from above. We have begun to integrate our analytics teams and build our cloud platform for all data to create a strong foundation for data delivery. At the same time, our clinical and operational leaders are defining the core metrics we use to benchmark performance and hold ourselves accountable to our goals. Our new enterprise operations report is the snapshot for guiding our work and outcomes in real time.
Joe Moscola. Executive vice president of enterprise services at Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y. ): At Northwell, it’s well-recognized how critical it is to break down data silos as we focus on elevating outcomes, improving efficiency and greatly enhancing the experience. Data sharing and collaboration across our organization is core to our care delivery and business performance. Due to our significant growth and scale our data resides inside of many clinical and non-clinical source systems. Aligned with our recent announcement of our EHR conversion to EPIC and coupled with our CRM and cloud relationships, we’ve embarked on our modernized enterprise data strategy which comprises our enterprise data program and modern data platform journey.
Also as part of the establishment of our enterprise digital services, we launched our office of enterprise data and information intelligence focused on stewarding our data journey to generate the most meaningful and easily consumable insights for decision making. Several of the key domains of focus aimed at breaking down silos include, data governance, data centralization, our integration layer and full thickness data literacy programming.
Randolph Siwabessy. CFO at UCI Health (Orange, Calif.): At UCI Health, we have taken significant steps to break down data silos in order to improve patient care. We have achieved this by enhancing our data architecture, refining our analytics resource model and implementing a robust governance framework that balances self-service analytics with best practices. By forming cross-functional teams, we have fostered collaboration to address hospital throughput, focusing on using data to prioritize daily opportunities. These teams work together to monitor standard enterprise metrics, which are shared across the entire organization through tiered daily huddles. This approach facilitates alignment with shared values and ensures a consistent focus on improving patient care. As a result of our efforts to present data in a consistent and actionable manner, we have achieved record-breaking outcomes in hospital throughput. This success demonstrates our commitment to leveraging data-driven insights to enhance the quality of care for our patients.
Brett MacLaren. Senior vice president of data and analytics at Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, Calif.): Kaiser Permanente has a history of breaking down data silos to improve care. We have a digital front door that provides members with better control over their health. By integrating data and using real-time analytics, we improve care and deliver better experiences.
We are investing in a modern, cloud-based, healthcare data platform that maximizes our data assets across our clinical and operational functions. This creates a trusted data source that drives decisions at all levels of our organization.
Overall, our efforts to break down data silos are improving the patient experience, lowering the cost of healthcare and delivering better health outcomes to the communities we serve.
Sean Poellnitz. Chief resource officer at Renown Health (Reno, Nev.): Overall, breaking down data silos in healthcare can lead to improved care coordination, reduced errors and better patient outcomes. I don’t think a secret playbook exists, but we all read from the same script, and undoubtedly, we have picked up the pace in the last several years.
Healthcare organizations are finding better ways to leverage EHR across their IDNs, adopt agile data interoperability standards, conduct more robust reviews of the need and integration of data analytics tools and authentically encourage patient engagement with platforms that empower patients to quarterback their healthcare.
This is the blueprint for success, and we are all building the plane as we fly it!
Jason P. Stopyra, MD, MS. Regional medical director of safety and security at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist (Winston-Salem, N.C.): Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist has taken several steps to break down silos to benefit our patients and teammates. One example is the creation of my position as market medical director of safety and security in August 2022. As a practicing emergency physician rooted in both community and academic medicine, our leadership has supported an innovative investigation of workplace violence within our healthcare system with a lens that views teammate safety as equally important to patient safety.
Through this process, I have been able to break down silos between nursing and providers as well as connect inpatient and outpatient care across multiple departments and campuses. Through new partnerships and collaborative pilot projects based on scientific methods within our region, we are building a consistent, evidenced-based multimodal approach to prevent workplace violence and ensure a healing environment for our teammates.
Seth Jeremy Katz. Vice president of revenue cycle and health information management at University Health KC (Kansas City): University Health has always been a very forward thinking organization when it comes to breaking down our data silos to drive improvements in patient care. We’ve joined multiple health information exchanges and are one of the few hospitals before the information blocking rule came out that published the entire patient record to those HIE’s so that no matter where our patient went, their entire clinical history went with them.
We were also an early adopter of open notes, giving patients full, real-time access to their health information via our patient portal. We also continue working on ways to streamline outcome data to our providers, so they can have accurate and timely information to better treat their patients.
Kellie Olmstead. Vice president and chief transformation officer at Nemours Children's Health: We are doing several things to break down data (and other) silos to improve patient care.
We have a system approach to clinical pathways. We have a dedicated team that leads our efforts by bringing together literature, system-level data and interdisciplinary teams to develop a common approach to specific diagnoses. We use common outcome and process measures that help us understand opportunities and areas of excellence. Prior to this approach, the data was very difficult for our clinicians to obtain and getting clarity on definitions was tricky.
We use a value stream approach to patient access which brings leaders and teams together.
We have common measures for access across all of our specialty locations (multi-state, dozens of locations) and expect to have primary care in the next two weeks. Again, the focus is on common definitions and common data sources to drive improvement. The standards have enabled us to have more meaningful conversations and learn lessons across the miles.
We also use a value stream approach to our revenue cycle. We look at the experience of a family from the first interaction through their final billing. We have focused on system-level data for years and it has been challenging. We have accepted regional differences, but we are currently working across areas to achieve single-source reporting. While we aren’t there yet, it is better than the smaller silos that we’ve had previously.
Data silos are top of mind for Nemours leadership. We are creating key new positions to oversee our data methodology, resources and approach which will further advance our ability to have common conversations with strong confidence in our data.
Stephen Flaherty, PhD, MBA. Research assistant professor at Bouve College of Health Sciences at The Roux Institute at Northeastern University and data scientist at Point32Health: Though we do not provide direct patient care, data silos are still a big problem. There is nothing more frustrating than to attend a meeting and find out about interesting work being done by a different team on data we did not know we had. We are combatting this issue by holding regular sessions where teams across our analytics spectrum present their work and projects, with lengthy discussion and Q&A. These sessions highlight the work done by diverse groups and raises awareness across all the analytics teams, opening doors for collaboration and expertise.
Jahmela Pech, DNP, RN. Executive director of quality management at Providence St. Joseph Hospital of Orange: Our organization is breaking down data silos to improve patient care by forming an Enterprise Analytics Center of Excellence earlier this year. The ACOE was developed to elevate analytic capabilities, align performance measurement, support clinical decision making and develop the data, insights and solutions to optimize operations across our family of organizations. The ACOE brings alignment and coherence to the analytics tools and products used across the Enterprise yet respects the need for some variation across different facilities. As a general rule, we aim for 80 percent of analytics tools and content to be shared across markets. The ACOE has strong personal points of connection to healthcare intelligence, population health and finance.
Kevin Murphy. Interim CFO at Mount Auburn Hospital: As a CFO, we always look to increase revenue realization by reducing denials which generally is a two to three percent annual opportunity.
I have identified three technological advances that increase a health system's volumes but also improves patient care:
- Reduce patient leakage and improve keepage of patients within the system
- Improve the patient experience with interpretive services that are technologically available in over 300 languages and only cost money when used and can be complementary to existing staff. This also achieves possible revenue from Medicare Waiver 1115 for social determinants of care pilot programs
- Implementing electronic patient sitting programs that improves patient satisfaction and safety
Bruce Rogen, MD, MPH, FACP. Chief medical officer at Cleveland Clinic Employee Health Plan and chair at Cleveland Clinic Quality Alliance CIN: We are reorganizing our clinical institute structure in a way that now has shared services across the institutes.
So rather than institutes sometimes duplicating efforts within silos, including data and analytics, the new shared services will work across all institutes, using data experts across the organization and content experts within each institute to provide better use of data and analytics.
Catherine Llavanes. CEO at Sante Health Partners Ambulatory Surgery Center: As a stand alone surgery center with multiple partnerships and servicing different specialties, one of the biggest challenges in our organization is the fragmentation of patient data across different systems, departments and providers.To break down these silos, our organizations has implemented a number of strategies, including:
- Use of EHR system: This can allow our healthcare providers to access and share patient information in real-time. This can also provide data analytics tools to help our organizations analyze data, identify areas for improvement, identify trends and patterns in patient data which enables us to develop more effective treatments and interventions and reduces the risk of errors.
- We are also improving our data sharing agreements to enable our organizations establish agreements with other providers to share patient data, ensuring that critical information is available when needed.
- Understanding the breaking down of data silos can also help our organizations provide better, more coordinated care for our patients. By utilizing data to identify areas for improvement, healthcare providers can improve patient outcomes, reduce cost and enhance the overall patient experience.
Russell D. Metcalfe-Smith. Executive director and associate professor at Cedars-Sinai Health System (Los Angeles): Using high-fidelity simulation to improve team working, clinical care and communication skills. A process for improving patient outcomes brings together professional groups to reduce the potential of adverse events while improving confidence and competence.
Nicholas Szymanski. Vice president and CIO at Signature Healthcare: From a technology standpoint, we are actively implementing a unified reporting tool that pulls from our EMR and also allows us to incorporate 'outside data.' But the real benefit here is that it creates the opportunity where people now have to come together to determine how metrics are pulled and calculated.
For example, over the years, I’m sure there are multiple LOS reports that exist, each calculated slightly differently. Now everyone will be reading from the same sheet of music because everyone will have had to agree or discuss how that is going to be calculated. Having one platform and creating that governance is how you can really start to break down the silos that inherently existed over the years.
Cody Mullen, PhD. Clinical associate professor at Purdue University and senior advisor at Indiana Rural Health Association: The training and preparation of various healthcare staff, both clinical and administrative and operational, is needed to understand various streams of data. Data that comes from both within one’s health system and data from governmental and community partners. The ability to merge and collaborate on this data is critical for the growing success of the organization and the improvement of health for the communities served!
Ryan Cameron. Vice president of innovation at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center - Omaha: Data silos don't stand a chance at Children's Hospital & Medical Center! As a people-first organization, we are laser-focused on fostering a culture of collaboration that encourages communication, sharing data and celebrates innovations in continuous improvement. In pediatric healthcare specifically, organizations must build cross-functional teams that include clinicians, IT professionals, data analysts and operational experts to work together on improving patient care.
For us, patient care also includes more than a child and we must be mindful of the entire care experience for patient families alike. This means having the right information, at the right time, every time. Investing in interoperability technologies and developing collaborative data governance have been key elements to our success. Most importantly, we are investing in training and educating our team to be empowered and confident working with data, using data standards and supporting our policies and processes. When teams or individuals feel like they must stand alone, data silos pop up. So, to prevent this we work every day to be collaborative and inclusive on data-driven projects in order to meet patient care goals.
Erik J. Blutinger, MD, MSc, FACEP. Medical director of community paramedicine at Mount Sinai Health Partners and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Health System (New York City): Data silos are being broken down thanks to collaborative efforts between programs and departments. It takes a village to make data more actionable, structured and responsive to patient needs despite budgetary restraints. Ultimately safe and efficient patient care relies upon sharing patient data given the complexity of healthcare systems.
Lora Niazov, MBA, PMP. Director of enterprise program management office at University Hospitals (Cleveland): University Hospitals has invested greatly into our data strategy and future data analytics to ensure that we are breaking down silos to improve the outcomes for our patients. Most recently, with the enterprise wide implementation of the latest version of EPIC, we have also implemented our Enterprise Data Warehouse in our new Microsoft Azure environment. This large investment has allowed us to create the most modern and scalable data architecture to date. We are addressing silos by conducting a robust current state analysis of the organizational current data needs and how we are evolving as a healthcare system to address the health questions of the future. Most importantly is that our data infrastructure is set up to enable robust analytical success.
Sunil Dadlani. Chief Information Officer at Atlantic Health System (Morristown, N.J.): Healthcare systems are experiencing unprecedented growth in the collection and use of data when it comes to improving patient care. Widespread use of EHRs, imaging, genomics and wearables are just a few sources of this useful information.
Breaking down silos is complex and challenging, requiring a cultural shift within an organization, to view data as a shared asset that can be leveraged to improve patient care outcomes. At Atlantic Health System, we see this as a great opportunity to improve patient engagement and experience, care quality and improve affordability and accessibility to every community member we serve.
We leverage both technology and people power to break down silos. Our enterprise-wide, integrated data approach starts with investments in state-of-the-art, cloud-based data platforms to ingest, curate and prepare data. This lets us build data models specific to a business function, including advanced, predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities thanks to AI/Machine Learning tools. Our robust data lifecycle management program covers a wide array of operational and management processes to ensure our data is not only useful, but that our team members are educated on how best to use it.
Additionally, cross-functional collaboration among various departments of Atlantic Health System ensures we are all on the same page. This means clinical staff, IT departments and data management teams all work together to identify key data needs and develop solutions.
David L. Reich. President at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Queens (New York City): With the help of Robbie Freeman, chief nursing informatics officer, here is an answer that summarizes Mount Sinai’s approach:
- Moving to a self-service platform to empower clinicians’ access to tools, such as Epic’s Slicer Dicer where they can explore data across clinical, operational and financial domains
- Educating and training: the enterprise data team sponsors a data academy that teaches best practices to our workforce in accessing, understanding and interpreting data
- Establishing data stewardship to align on enterprise processes and definitions for data and metrics
- Valuing equity and inclusion by establishing tools to measure and visualize disparities related to race, ethnicity and socio-economic status across data sets and quality indicators.
Steve Davis, MD. President and CEO at Cincinnati Children's: From a technology perspective, we are making significant progress on the implementation of a data fabric architecture which includes data virtualization technology and an enterprise data catalog. This architecture is designed to enable collaboration and agility for data preparation and data discovery across the organization. Data virtualization allows disparate sources to be connected logically, enabling us to build an enterprise data platform that our data practitioners across the organization can access and contribute. The enterprise data catalog enables transparency and discovery of key clinical and operations concepts and data assets. We are also refreshing our business intelligence tools by implementing Microsoft Power BI across the organization.
We support this technology with:
- Strong oversight from our data and AI governance councils which is made up of leaders throughout the organization
- Data stewardship through an active data stewards group
- Engagement from data practitioners throughout the organization through communities of practice for organizing, displaying and using data.
This combination of social and technical infrastructure lets us combine centralized IT resources with localized analytic expertise throughout the organization, all using a standardized technical ecosystem.
Chad M. Teven, MD, MBA, FACS, HEC-C. Reconstructive microsurgeon and clinical assistant professor in the surgery department at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine (Chicago): One key area is identifying and leveraging new technology platforms that allow for data accumulation and analysis on a previously unobtainable level. This is one of the focus areas of many of our key departments, including the enterprise data warehouse, IT, innovation and more. Additionally, we actively engage in collaboration and conversations across and within departments and divisions – both clinical and administrative – so we can use learnings from one group that may be helpful to others. Finally, we are making tremendous efforts toward EHR interoperability, aggregating patient data and data standardization.
Kevin Klauer, DO. Chief medical officer at HCA Florida Ocala Hospital: At HCA Florida Ocala and West Marion hospitals, we have a practical approach to data. We are fortunate to benefit greatly from the resources provided by and available to all HCA facilities. Our focus is to target data analysis toward high-yield opportunities to improve service. Practical data informs pragmatic solutions. Everyday, we are putting data to work committing to the care and improvement of human life.
Joanne Mizell. COO at Banner|Aetna: Banner|Aetna was created to help consumers navigate the many silos they encounter when they move between being a member and a patient in their healthcare journey. It’s about simplifying the journey so that as a patient, they can focus on their care and as a member, they can have a seamless understanding of their final costs after benefits and insurance payments are applied.
Last year, we launched our frictionless billing initiative, where we work with Banner Health to create and deliver a single statement that includes both insurance and provider billing details, with the amount due clearly shown. No more comparing multiple EOBs and provider bills — it is all in one statement, jointly branded and representing their single source of truth. We are continuing to work with our health system partner to remove as much complexity as possible, so that patients can focus on getting the best care possible.
James Lindgren. Executive director of revenue cycle systems optimization at University of Miami Health: The faculty and staff at the University of Miami are the best in the world at what they do. This includes the entire team that is committed to delivering the best care from our physicians, advanced practitioners, nurses, administrative support, revenue cycle staff, finance staff and everyone in between. The worst thing we could do would be to silo data to limit their ability to perform their critical roles. Our data governance processes ensure that everything lives in one data warehouse, with no exceptions. Our EMR sits in the center of this ecosystem and sets the rules of the road for our data structures and then all other systems must feed into this one central place. Every project that we undertake that will generate new data must review an integration prior to being implemented. This ensures that data is all in one place.
Ethan Booker, MD. Chief medical officer of telehealth and medical director for MedStar Telehealth Innovation Center at MedStar Health (Columbia, Md.): I think about opportunities to break down silos at three levels:
- National research level: MedStar Health has created the Connected CARE — Care Access, Research, Equity — & Safety Consortium to evaluate the transformational impact of telehealth in primary care access, working in collaboration with Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Health and funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. We have established encounter-level data sharing and analysis across research collaborator EHRs to enhance clinical practice and patient safety, studying more than 5 million encounters for over 1.2 million patients.
- Organizational, population level: We are also enhancing a MedStar Health Analytics Platform that allows us to collect, analyze and visualize information about our patient population. Our goal is to identify and engage patient populations that could benefit from certain interventions (e.g., those behind schedule on cancer screening) and then drive personalized care through technology.
- Patient level: We work within our EHR and integrated tools to understand the care context of a single patient across our system, allowing our clinicians to have the sense of 'knowing' the patient quickly and accurately. This can be challenging, but our health system has consistently driven toward a single EHR instance as we have intentionally grown across 10 hospitals, 33 urgent cares, more than 300 total sites of care, and thousands of associates who interact with this data regularly. We also strive to continually improve the experience and outcomes of navigating the EHR – not only through MedStar Health’s informatics team, but also our Institute for Innovation, Research Institute, National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, and Center for Wellbeing.
John Finkbeiner. Senior clinical informaticist at South Shore Hospital (Chicago): A challenge I see is that someone in the hospital will start a new process or project to improve patient care. Too often I see, at least in small hospitals, staff being included in a project only as the need. Newly included staff find themselves researching the history of the project and examining how they fit in. We have been making efforts to make sure that all stakeholders are represented at the outset. Those efforts have resulted in better adoption, saving time and lessening frustration; this encourages better participation and a thorough understanding of the importance of that process.
Russell Horton, DO. Medical director of clinical innovation for Banner Innovation Group at Banner Health (Phoenix): As a large health system with a lot of care delivery units plus a growing payer arm, we naturally have a lot of data and a lot of silos. Breaking those down is imperative and is something we are actively working on. We are trying to create an overarching plan to gather all our data into more accessible systems that can talk to each other and allow us to query that data more easily and efficiently. The biggest step is deciding why we have all this data and what we want to do with it. From there the work can begin to coalesce and modernize all our different data streams to be under 'one roof' for the good of the whole organization.
Jawad Khan. Chief data and analytics officer at Tufts Medicine: Tufts Medicine had a brilliant idea – to create a data platform that could provide accurate and consistent information to the right people at the right time. This platform would be instrumental in making data-driven decisions to enhance clinical outcomes for patients and the community. To make this vision a reality, they developed a cutting-edge platform called WIISE, which stands for Wellness Intelligence and Information Sharing Enablement. The platform uses Lakehouse architecture and the HL7® FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard to eliminate data silos between various systems and provide patient data seamlessly to internal and external users.
The WIISE platform faced its first challenge during its inception, which was to convert and archive data from over 24 different EHRs systems from vendors like Cerner, GE Centricity and Allscripts to name a few. But the team overcame this challenge by loading all the systems' data into WIISE Lakehouse and harmonizing their disparate, proprietary data models using the FHIR v3 schema. This breakthrough provided data analysts with the unique ability to search three decades of archived patient data from different vendors' databases for over 4 million patients' records using a single query.
This approach addressed several challenges, but the most significant one was providing a single view of a patient across all their care settings. This unified approach delivered the much-needed efficiency and cost savings. Today, the WIISE platform allows Tufts Medicine's analytics community, which includes data scientists, data engineers, software developers, analysts as well as citizen data analysts and scientists, to collaborate and engage with the data. The platform has made the data easily accessible and broken down the silos between data and human functions. The platform now enables many key data and analytics solutions like AI-based scheduling, research data models, and unified operational and financial reporting. It's amazing to see how Tufts Medicine is revolutionizing patient care with this innovative platform!
Sarah Poncelet. Division chair of strategy development at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.): The Center for Digital Health within Mayo Clinic has a chief data and analytics officer. Within this team is our data literacy and governance team. They are the stewards of Mayo Clinic’s data and have a vision to foster data citizenship in a digital era. The data literacy program is built upon the foundation of high-quality data through data governance.
Yohan Vetteth. Vice president and chief analytics officer at Stanford Health Care and School of Medicine (Palo Alto, Calif.): We are transitioning from a more centralized analytics model that frequently drives dispersed groups to create data silos to an 'aligned autonomy' model. This model drives alignment of the distributed analytics groups and data framework to the overall organizational mission, which provides the highest levels of patient care and makes it unnecessary to have independent data silos. A key underpinning of this approach is the overall data governance foundation to also allow different groups to use data in the same way across the organization, resulting in better support for our patients and care staff.
Deborah Akinyele. Clinical director of Early Start Therapy Clinic (Houston): Our care model integrates multiple clinical disciplines and promotes collaboration between providers and administrative staff. We train all staff on the fundamentals of each team member's role and the data they need to perform their duties. We also make patient data relevant to both providers and administrative staff available on a tech-enabled collaborative platform. This allows them to gain a better understanding of how each individual role overlaps and what data needs to be shared across the team to best support each patient's needs.
Eric Smith. Chief digital officer at Memorial Hermann Health System (Houston): As a health system, Memorial Hermann recognizes the importance and power of data to improve patient care. The data we use is de-identified and then reviewed in aggregate, so it can be applied to broader learning opportunities. Sourcing from clinical, claims and consumer engagement systems, we develop a comprehensive longitudinal view of our patients and create data sets that can be used across the system — leveraging those to produce comprehensive dashboards and self-service analytical tools that enable our accelerating learning. We then apply lessons learned not only to further personalize the care we deliver but also to improve outcomes and address health inequities in our communities.
Beyond the work happening within our walls, Memorial Hermann is also proud to be a founding health system partner and investor in Truveta, a company whose vision is to save lives with data. This innovative partnership allows us to collaborate with other major health systems across the U.S. to harness data for the advancement of patient health and research on a larger scale.
Ihuoma Emenuga, MD, MPH, MBA. Chief medical officer at FHCB Health System (Baltimore): Data silos often result from a narrow focus on traditional predetermined metrics, similar to focusing on one piece of a puzzle with limited appreciation for the entire puzzle. This is often rewarded and therefore encouraged. To break down these silos we have focused on desired patient outcomes as opposed to processes: This compels us to align, collaborate and co-manage data in a manner which ignores traditional organizational charts and line management designations. Managers overseeing diverse roles which traditionally would report separately has enabled us to abolish the data silos that would inadvertently have been created.
Jody Reyes. Senior vice president and COO at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center: Over the last several years, Penn State Health has expanded into a multi-hospital health system that serves patients and communities across Pennsylvania. The system has implemented several initiatives to address data silos and improve patient care. Last year, Penn State Health completed the implementation of a comprehensive EHR system, allowing for seamless sharing of data, documentation and communication across departments, hospitals and outpatient practices. Patients expect and deserve safe, coordinated care – achieved through one central system that provides real-time, comprehensive data to be used for clinical decision-making and care delivery.