Data quality is an Achilles heel for virtually every industry, and a common problem is outdated data stacks, especially now since AI programs pull from this data, making insights from good data easier to incorporate, but creating chaos when data is of poor quality. In the healthcare industry, this chaos can be extra impactful with lives literally hanging in the balance.
A new research report from cloud data engineering consultancy Hakkōda, Healthcare State of Data 2024, which surveyed 145 director to CEO level data leaders from large healthcare organizations, finds that just 11.3 percent of healthcare organizations surpassed their financial goals in 2023. With razor thin margins, complex regulatory frameworks to navigate and continued challenges in staffing, healthcare data leaders struggle to fund their initiatives.
However, these same data initiatives are consistently profitable for healthcare organizations, who report an average ROI of 124 percent for their data technology investments. But 51 percent of healthcare organizations need to modernize their data stack a great deal this year, and 41 percent need to modernize their data stack somewhat.
Among the key findings:
- 51 percent of healthcare organizations need to modernize their data stack a great deal this year
- 44 percent of healthcare leaders report struggling with data quality and governance
- 42 percent of healthcare leaders report that integrating data across multiple silos is a major challenge for data management and operations at their organization
- 25 percent of healthcare organizations report that they are already their data
Healthcare leaders have ambitious goals for what they intend to achieve with their data in the years ahead, but their data infrastructure tends to lag behind other industries by significant margins.
Healthcare leaders are ready to implement Generative AI
About a third (34 percent) of healthcare data leaders strongly agree that their organization has defined generative AI use cases that they are ready to implement, and just under half indicated their organizations were already dabbling with GenAI in small applications.
Culture limits data-driven innovation
Only 28 percent of healthcare leaders believe their organizations have a high rate of data literacy. When asked about their biggest obstacles around data management and operations, 46 percent of healthcare organizations say creating a data-driven organizational culture is their number one challenge.
Healthcare needs help with data modernization
Only 23 percent of healthcare organizations currently centralize data on a primary cloud platform, but 74 percent plan to do so by 2025. And 84 percent report they need a moderate to large amount of external support to help modernize their data.
“The report shows that healthcare organizations are eager to invest in their data, but continue to face modernization challenges,” said Chris Puuri, vice president, head of healthcare and Life Sciences at Hakkōda, in a news release. “However, they do not have to carve a path to data maturity alone. To combat talent gaps, healthcare data leaders can leverage outside technical expertise and managed services, so long as those third-party advisors and service providers are well versed in healthcare’s unique needs and constraints.”
Download the full report here.
The Healthcare State of Data report was drawn from a study conducted on behalf of Hakkoda by Lawless Research in December 2023 as a blind survey of 500 director to CEO level data leaders from large organizations across major industries. 20% of respondents came from organizations with less than $500M annual revenue; 29% with $500M to $999.9M annual revenue; 37% with $1B to $9.9B annual revenue; 14% with $10B or more annual revenue.
