VIDEO | Bon Secours Mercy Health CDO: Data Quality Is an Issue Wherever There Is Data

(US and Canada) Shahidul Mannan, Chief Data Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, speaks with Jon Kimerle, Global Epic Alliance Manager at Pure Storage, in a video interview about the evolution of the CDO role, bridging the data quality gap, the need for data literacy, and enabling self-service.

Sharing his view on the evolving CDO role, Mannan says the chief data officer focuses on not only technology or data and architecture, compliance, and data governance but also innovation and digitalization. He adds that the Affordable Care Act, digital EHRs, and telehealth have led to an enormous health care data footprint, and it is increasing. Data-driven innovation is required to address this issue.

Regarding initiatives to bridge the data quality gap, Mannan says quality is an issue wherever there is data. The problem is even more prominent in health care because of diverse unstructured data sources. He adds that this makes health care CDOs more focused on managing data, ensuring quality, and making it authoritative.

Mannan also highlights a couple of challenges:

• Data silos, where systems are not integrated and interoperability is difficult.

• Ensuring high-quality and authoritative data.

Bon Secours Mercy Health completely restructured its architecture and technology stack to solve the issues. The organization used emerging technologies to build trusted data assets where various data sources could be combined at very high volumes and near real-time speeds.

Continuing, Mannan discusses data literacy. He mentions evangelism as a major part of the CDO role, involving data literacy across the organization.

He breaks down the issue into two parts:

1. Adoption — Everyone must be aligned with the strategy to drive data-based decisions and build applications to improve health care quality.

2. Innovation — Many ideas are more effective coming from the field level. Data culture is necessary so field users can connect the dots and realize they are creating something of value.

When asked how Bon Secours Mercy Health enables self-service while maintaining security and compliance, Mannan says it is a complex ecosystem due to sensitive health care data. He reveals that the organization provides experiment environments for various constituencies. Each business area, small or large, has its small-scale environment where they can experiment. If an experiment works, the idea can be expanded for larger, production-grade application development or other projects.

From a technology perspective, Mannan says that apart from the data lake, there are small pond-like self-service data ecosystems for various groups that manage them independently. The CDO organization only provides support for innovation.

CDO Magazine thanks Shahidul Mannan for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.