Beth Falder, AVP of data and analytics at Nuvance Health, speaks with Michael Hejtmanek, VP of Corporate Solutions and consulting at Neudata, in a video interview about her role, the transformation of healthcare, measuring KPI success, shifting to a data product mindset, integrating AI in healthcare, and its impact on data.

NUVANCE Health, a healthcare delivery network in Connecticut and New York, is focused on using data to enhance care and better serve its communities.

Falder oversees all data-related functions. She leads efforts to manage and utilize data from a wide range of sources, including clinical systems, HR, supply chain, patient experience surveys, and quality outcomes. Her team works to harness the full scope of available data to support the organization’s operations and strategic goals.

Transforming healthcare data from crisis to cloud

Reflecting on her organization’s transformation, Falder shares how a few years ago, the organization had disparate data systems in its early state. The health system she works with is relatively new, having been formed by the 2019 merger of two separate entities.

 “We merged two health systems into one in 2019 and rapidly had to pivot in 2020 due to the COVID outbreak and started there,” Falder recalls. The urgency of the pandemic brought clarity to existing gaps as hospitals and communities had to react in near real time to what was happening, she says.

 “From there, it became very apparent that we needed a different way to do business,” Falder notes. With this realization, the organization partnered with AWS to transition its data into a unified cloud environment and started addressing key strategic initiatives.

This partnership went all the way from top to bottom, assessing the KPIs and how to make those actionable. Falder adds, “How can we make it easy for not just our leadership team but also our managers, our boots on the ground, to know how we’re performing on those keys and then trickle down to their areas to show how it relates to how we do business on a day-to-day basis.”

Measuring KPI success — Shifting to a data product mindset

When asked about ways to measure the success of the KPIs, she states that the organization keeps a strategic scorecard representing every aspect of the business, aligning those metrics with critical service areas. This scorecard is reviewed regularly during CEO meetings and business initiative discussions to ensure performance visibility.

To support these key performance indicators (KPIs), ongoing enhancements are made, helping teams understand which additional factors can influence and improve results. “It’s never-ending. As I’m sure all data leaders know. Once you give people a little piece of data, they want all the data,” Falder notes.

The next aspect Falder says is shifting toward a data product mindset. This will enable the organization to start with self-service capabilities and empower end users to engage with data in more meaningful ways. Also, it will allow moving beyond reacting to past performances to proactively determining, “What is my next best action to drive improvements in our new areas?”

Integration of AI in healthcare

Falder mentions that AI has been in healthcare for a very long time before it made a breakthrough in 2023. She mentions the predictive models that drove care plans.

Speaking of Nuvance, she maintains that there are two tiers to the organization’s AI strategies.

The first focuses on partnering with external vendors to integrate AI into clinical systems. These applications typically require rigorous oversight, including regulatory approvals such as those from the FDA. Given the complexity and compliance demands, Nuvance opts to collaborate with trusted partners who provide vetted tools, rather than developing these solutions in-house, she affirms.

The second tier centers on building internal AI capabilities. This began with identifying specific business problems and testing initial AI solutions to gain experience. Looking ahead, Nuvance plans to develop a multimodal cloud environment that can support a range of AI tools. The goal is to use these technologies to empower teams across the organization and drive measurable improvements in outcomes.

AI implementation impact on data

Reflecting on the impact of these implementations on data, Falder states that the data is not fully structured and clean to be fed to an AI model. However, she is thankful for the data standard already in place called the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard.

“We are actually leveraging those FHIR capabilities to then embed them into our AI platforms so that we can have a little more trust in our data,” Falder shares. Alongside that, the organization utilizes NLP capabilities to assess unstructured data, put it into a translatable, structured manner, and then turn it valuable by putting AI on top of it.

Wrapping up, Falder notes that the organization is working closely with cloud vendors to address complex data challenges, particularly through the use of AWS tools designed for healthcare. These tools analyze healthcare-specific language found in physician, nurse, and surgical notes to extract meaningful insights.

In conclusion, she says that this area holds significant potential, as it taps into a wealth of previously underutilized information. The organization aims to advance this effort significantly in the coming year.

CDO Magazine appreciates Beth Falder for sharing her insights with our global community.