A study by the Healthcare Center of Excellence revealed that lack of leadership was the greatest inhibitor to implementing healthcare analytics, and that hospitals need experts who are well-versed in all aspects of leadership to make the most of analytics.
“If you do not have good leadership, things won’t work well, because a leader defines things like where data is held and will make the decisions that staff cannot make,” said Bryan Bennett, executive director of the Healthcare Center of Excellence. “Leaders have to fight the fights and get involved and make everyone work together to advance analytics goals. With everyone just on their own there is no cohesive strategy to implement analytics.”
What’s more, Bennett said, the history of leadership in healthcare is not conducive to exceptional analytics deployments.
Learn more at the Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum in San Franciso, May 15-16, 2017. Register here.
“In the past, healthcare has been pretty autocratic,” he explained. “The CEO or the doctor in charge, whatever they said, went. That has been the case for 100 years. But today you have to have an inclusive strategy where everyone is part of the solution. If you are collecting data on patients, everyone has to make sure the data is collected and collected properly. If you do not have good data, you will have bad results coming out the other end.”
Good leaders who make analytics work have a variety of skills that help make achieve that, Bennett said.
“Good leaders are risk takers – you have to be out in front, you are the leader,” he said. “And you have to know who your people are and get the most out of them. That is a key factor because you may be getting people to do things they don’t want to do or haven’t done in the past. You have to get them onboard, so you need good communication skills. Also, you have to have vision, because without that vision or direction there are just people walking around maybe playing with the technology and the data, all without a cohesive vision, which must come from the top.”
Leadership is a process that must be prescribed like a maintenance drug and practiced every day using the same approach taken by professional athletes, Bennett argued.
“Leadership is not something you can just do once in a while – a great leader does it every day, thinks about it every day,” he said. “Regarding athletes, no matter how good an athlete is, they have coaches throughout their careers, and they continually reflect on what they have done to see if they could have done things differently. A leader has to have reflection and coaching in order for them to develop their leadership skills.”
A good leader should always be asking themselves how they could have done something differently, Bennett said of reflection.
“If you do not have that reflection, you will never learn from what you have done in the past,” he added. “And coaching and mentoring is having someone you can talk to and say, ‘Hey, I ran this initiative, but how would you have handled it?’ That can be a peer at a different organization or someone who is above you in your organization. As leaders get higher in an organization, there are fewer people they can talk to there, so they need to seek opportunities with people from other organizations.”
Bennett will deliver a keynote address on analytics and leadership issues at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Big Data & Healthcare Analytics Forum, May 15-16, 2017, in San Francisco, during a session entitled “Prescribing Leadership in Healthcare.”
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
