045 - Healthcare Analytics…or Actionable Decision Support Tools? Leadership Strategies from Novant Health’s SVP of Data Products, Karl Hightower
Healthcare professionals need access to decision support tools that deliver the right information, at the right time. In a busy healthcare facility, where countless decisions are made on a daily basis, it is crucial that any analytical tools provided actually yield useful decision support to the target customer. In this episode, I talked to Karl Hightower from Novant Health about how he and his team define “quality” when it comes to data products, and what they do to meet that definition in their daily work. Karl Hightower is the Chief Data Officer and SVP of Data Products at Novant Health, a busy hospital and medical group in the Southeast United States with over 16 hospitals and more than 600 clinics. Karl and I took a deep dive into data product management, and how Karl and his team are designing products and services that help empower all of the organization’s decision makers. In our chat, we covered:
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“I tend to think of product management as a core role along with a technical lead and product designer in the software industry. Outside the software industry, I feel like product management is often this missing hub. ” - Brian
“I really want to understand why the person is asking for what they're asking for, so there is much more of a closer relationship between that portfolio team and their end-user community that they're working with. It's almost a day-to-day living and breathing with and understanding not just what they're asking for and why are they asking for it, but you need to understand how they use information to make decisions.” - Karl
“I think empathy can sound kind of hand-wavy at times. Soft and fluffy, like whipped cream. However, more and more at senior levels, I am hearing how much leaders feel these skills are important because the technology can be technically right and effectively wrong.” - Brian
“The decision that we got to on executive governance was how are we going to judge success criteria? How do we know that we're delivering the right products and that we're getting better on the maturity scale? And the metric is actually really simple. Ask the people that we're delivering for, does this give you what you need when you need it to make those decisions? - Karl
“The number one principle is, if I don't know how something is done [created with data], I'm very unlikely to trust it. And as you look at just the nature of healthcare, transparency absolutely has to be there because we want the clinicians to poke holes in it, and we want everyone to be able to trust it. So, we are very open. We are very transparent with everything that goes in it.” - Karl
“You need to really understand the why. You’ve got to understand what business decisions are being made, what's driving the strategy of the people who are asking for all that information.” - Karl
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