The Healthcare Data Goldrush: Leavitt Partners’ Ryan Howells & IMO’s Dale Sanders Lay Out A Guide for Prospectors

The digital transformation of healthcare has been a long and
winding road, but one that is starting to open new possibilities
in every aspect of business operations, care delivery and
consumer experiences. The critical aspect to all of this is a
newfound access to data.

Dale Sanders and Ryan Howells have been at the forefront of the
movement to unlock data in healthcare and help organization
leverage it to actually drive business and clinical performance.
As Principal at Leavitt Partners, Ryan works with the White
House, Congress, HHS, and VHA on health care policy and
interoperability issues. He also currently leads the CARIN
Alliance, a multi-sector, public-private alliance focused on
giving consumers digital access to their health information. Dale
is Chief Strategy officer at Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO)
where he closely analyzes market needs and challenges to set
IMO’s strategic direction developing products that deliver
critical data quality improvements and insights to improve
patient care.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Keith Figlioli draws on
the decades of experience Dale and Ryan have driving healthcare
data policy and strategy. Their discussion touches on the
intricate details of healthcare data, the everyday impacts that
data can have on healthcare consumers, and many points in
between. They cover topics including:



Entering the “app economy” for healthcare. Ryan points
out that almost every other aspect of the consumer world
entered the app economy almost 20 years ago. But for
healthcare, that transition is just starting. They talk about
how the emergence of structured data eliminates the need to
rely solely on legacy vendors to solve problems, and the
potential it unlocks for creating new, billion dollar
companies.


Encouraging physicians to stage a riot. The group
discusses how quality measures are creating administrative
overhead, burning-out physicians, and affecting data quality in
ways that many people don’t realize. With revenue streams that
are tied to these outdated processes and make them difficult to
change, a shift towards measuring outcomes will not be easy.
What will it take? Dale says one option he’s encouraging is an
uprising among physicians.


The B-to-C-to-B data strategy. Data privacy has been a
big hurdle to enabling the exchange of EHR data and patient
information between organizations. But what if patients have
full control of their data and can be the conduit between
providers and other organizations? Ryan talks about how this
can fundamentally change the issue of data portability by
eliminating the need to negotiate and implement complex legal
agreements required to exchange data between two organizations.
They talk about how this strategy hinges on the ability to
verify digital identities.


Disrupting EHR incumbents. With so much change on the
horizon and data access creating new possibilities for
healthcare’s core infrastructure, should incumbent EHR vendors
be nervous? Dale says a new enterprise infrastructure in
healthcare – a next-gen EHR that’s focused on team-based care,
not the encounter – is imperative. And he offers advice on how
to get there. Ryan adds his belief that the industry needs a
complete new coding system built for value-based care, not fee
for service.



To hear Keith, Dale and Ryan talk about these topics and more,
listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for
Insiders.