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Data arrives on a daily, hourly and a real-time basis and health systems today are struggling more than ever to use it efficiently. Not only are data volumes increasing almost exponentially, but they are no longer constrained to words and figures but include images, sound and video from an array of sources. The challenge is to gain insight from this wealth of data in order to improve management, spot future trends and identify areas of increasing demand.

While health systems in all sectors know that they need to understand data and gain insight for competitive and financial advantage few understand exactly how can this be done. This problem is particularly acute in the healthcare sector.  Many health systems have been criticised for not having a single view of their organisation, have not been able to track patient demand and thus managing risk and for not being able to deliver new services as quickly as patients demand; that health systems ability to change has been hampered by the inflexibility and complexity of the operational structures and their inability to integrate data and gain a real insight from this. Health systems have all the data they need but they have managed their data in silos-they need to manage the data across platforms and use analytics to build insights.

Managing a health system is all about managing data but it is estimated poor quality data will cost the sector many millions in increased operating costs. To gain a single integrated view of the health system in order to build patient and staff relationships and to establish trust, health systems must understand what patients want and what they need. The data needed to achieve this is by and large readily available – but not been used in the most effective way.  The economic crisis has also underscored the need for health systems to become more astute in their approach to patient management. Like many Information Systems good data management and information systems are frequently grown through acquisition and incremental functional improvement in silos aligned along individual lines and regions of operations. These silos hamper the ability to gain an enterprise-wide view of health systems.  They must therefore work to integrate their systems and provide transparency across these silos.

Health systems must understand that they need to stop operating as a number of siloed operational units and act as a single integrated enterprise - not only are patients and staff alike demanding this but so also will the regulators. Research demonstrates that a compelling rationale exists that the move towards a new healthcare environment, with improved information management and cross silo integration that could provide the foundation for an era of smarter healthcare delivery.  Healthcare systems can then go on to harness the latest advanced analytics to model patient demands across a whole range of specialities or even track risk across multiple regions. With smarter systems health managers can then offer their patients and staff a more customised solution. Insufficient information and the pace of change have increased risk to patients. Turning all their data into information that can provide a real insight is a problem for all. Despite the exponential growth of data 47% of senior managers claim they don't have sufficient information to do their job and 79% making decisions based on intuition. As the focus of health care leaders moves from survival and stability to future prosperity they should note that none of this is possible without addressing the central data issue.

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