Joe Forgione - SEPATON

Throughout history the healthcare value chain has been driven by a combination of several key classes of assets: healthcare practitioners (doctors, nurses), delivery vehicles (hospitals, clinics), healthcare products (from pharmaceuticals to CAT scans and MRI equipment). And of course, driving the economic engine of healthcare are the payers, such as privately-funded insurers and government (state and federal) entities.

While each of these entities has used data in many forms to deliver their part of the healthcare value chain, the data itself has not necessarily been managed as an asset itself. Well, all of that is dramatically changing before our eyes and the change will continue to accelerate over the next several years. We will soon see the data behind healthcare rise from a secondary part of the healthcare value chain, to a place of supremacy as perhaps the most important asset in the system.

At the same time as the value of data is increasing, the volume of data is rising at incredible rates that surpasses most other industries. Just one aspect of healthcare data, the historical medical record for an individual patient, can contain hundreds of GBytes (and even TBs or more) of data as they include not only information on medications and clinical notes but large files such as MRIs and X-rays.

What does this mean to healthcare providers and others in the healthcare ecosystem? As is the case with any asset, healthcare data has to be protected, secured, and analyzed, to deliver higher quality service to patients, economic gain to the top line (revenue), and bottom line cost savings. If it is treated as an asset, then, at a minimum, healthcare data must be protected, secured, and encrypted to ensure privacy; replicated for rapid recovery; and linked to other systems in the value chain.

But beyond that, healthcare data as an asset can be analyzed and used to delivery higher quality care (and as appropriate, drive greater profits for providers). This is what healthcare big data is all about and it will begin to explode over the next few years. With all that data, providers can tap into its hidden value by analyzing and providing information on linkages between drugs and outcomes, identifying trends and patterns in healthcare delivery, and using the data in ways that clinicians could have only imagined.

Today, the healthcare industry must begin to think strategically about how to manage and protect these big and valuable data assets. As a necessary first step, participants in the healthcare ecosystem must employ best practices in key areas such as data protection and they must employ solutions that can scale and keep up with the data volume demands over the next several years. Additionally, to capture the inherent value in the data, they must begin to plan for analyzing this “big data”. By doing so today’s participants in healthcare will become tomorrow’s leaders in transforming the delivery of cost-effective healthcare services.

For decades, companies in the software industry have focused on the development, distribution, and protection of “intellectual property” within their software. Intellectual property as it applies to software includes copyrights, trade secrets, and patents that are typically related to the design of software in the form of source code. Until recently, the industry was driven to “keep it secret” and “keep it closed”. In the 90s the software industry began to embrace the concept of “open” in the form of open source as well as through standard interfaces and open APIs. Gone were the days of proprietary software and the industry began to compete more on the pace of innovation. This era ushered in the concepts of communities and sharing, packaging, and services, which became the cornerstones of the open source movement.

Now we are entering a new phase of how IP is controlled that is based on the concept of “intelligent partnering”. Given the openness of the foundation technology (including both hardware and software) and the variability of new classes of applications from social media, to big data analytics, to complex storage systems, etc., the number of components or building blocks required to create a complete solution has increased dramatically. That is coupled with the fact that global markets have increased the pace of innovation with product lifecycles that run from early adopter to end-of-life in only a few years. The result is that no single vendor, not even the largest, can put together innovative solutions to meet the demanding market requirements in a fast paced world. While quite a change from the way things used to be done, the benefit of IP is the pace of innovation for both customers and vendors enabling them to be leaders in their respective industries leading to real economic value.

A good example is that not too long ago, major vendors all designed their own processors, servers and storage, and operating systems. Today, everyone skips that step and simply purchases commodities off the shelf. The idea is to pick the right building blocks and partner and focus IP higher in the stack to get the best solution to the customer faster and more efficiently.
There are lots of non IT examples of this as well. People originally had to cook from scratch which took a lot of time. As more people entered the workforce, cooking using "building blocks" (packaged foods found in the grocery store today) allowed them to do it faster and repurpose their time on things with higher economic return (working outside the home as an example).

As a result, we are entering a phase in which intelligent partnering will be one of the key hallmarks, along with the other IP that truly differentiates the winners from the losers. The winners will be those companies who are first to get beyond the idea that they have to do everything themselves. Then quickly and intelligently assemble the right group of participants in a multi-disciplinary, multi-lateral partnership to address a well defined market opportunity. These partnerships must include both technology and go-to-market relationships and the operative rule is that there are no rules. Each one will need to be customized from the outside in to address the market opportunity as well as the unique contributions of each player. Two areas of technology that are particularly ripe for creative partnering are big data and data protection.