Prophet’s Health Changemakers podcast — highlighting healthcare leaders who are driving change within their organizations and across the industry — featured RLDatix’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Darrell Johnson, in a recent episode. You can listen to the full episode here.
Johnson, a self-proclaimed healthcare “data geek,” is on a mission to help hospitals and health systems optimize their data and data structures to foster better outcomes. Considering that the healthcare industry is highly regulated and often resistant to change, the greatest hurdle is often figuring out how to remove the complexity from data to clear the path for meaningful insights.
Focusing on more near-term, operational solutions is no small task — Johnson acknowledges the hundreds of variables that play into the continuum of care and ensuring safe outcomes. He highlighted a three-pronged approach to drive improvement and innovation:
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Leverage the cloud. It’s critical that organizations remove data silos and leverage the efficiency of a public cloud environment. On-premise solutions have outlived their usefulness and public hosting solutions are more cost affordable with strong data security and disaster recovery capabilities. Working in a public cloud like RLDatix’s Catalix platform (in partnership with AWS) also offers scalable data insights capabilities, lower costs, automated deployments, improved scalability, and reliability.
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Modernize the tech stack. While we can talk about technical solutions, it’s just talk if the underlying data isn’t useful to the organization. Today, health systems spend a significant amount of time cleansing data for strategic use. A modernized solutions infrastructure can help organizations standardize source data more accurately and effectively, reducing the burden on staff and providing richer insights.
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Integrate multiple operations and data streams. Health systems struggle with departmentalized data systems, with complexity in sharing and creating enterprise datasets to garner quality insights. There is an opportunity to reduce this administrative burden, creating software integration that enables healthcare organizations to align applications, enable single sign-on (SSO), and alleviate the administrative burden for users who access multiple tools daily.
All this serves to make the experience operate more seamlessly for patients and providers alike. While reduced keyboard time and fewer clicks may not seem like much, Johnson underscored that these little things are often what create the most friction and frustration across health systems.
The bottom line: Change is a process
Driving change within an organization is no small task. Change often hinges on alignment — and simply having a few stakeholders or leaders onboard isn’t enough. For real, transformational innovation, health systems must find a way to get the majority of stakeholders involved and ensure everyone understands why the change matters. Meaningful, reproducible change is a process.
Johnson is optimistic about the opportunities enabled by this approach. With efficient administration, incident tracking, and workforce management, healthcare organizations can facilitate real change and benefit from rich data to inform learning, evangelize best practices, and, ultimately, deliver safer care.
Learn how RLDatix can help your organization optimize data and improve outcomes.
