Futurist David Houle has said that, within three years, there won’t be a Fortune 500 company without a chief data officer or chief data engineer. And data has become so relevant to the way healthcare is delivered and paid for that it’s not far-fetched to think we will see the same thing happen with big hospitals and insurance companies.
The technology- and business-savvy chief data officer wouldn’t replace the role of the chief information officer or chief technology officer, but he would work under or alongside him to leverage data as a strategic business asset. That means managing how it’s processed and mined, and using it at the executive level to help set strategic priorities, establish standards and optimize revenue.
In a Fox Business interview from Davos, Switzerland yesterday, Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove commented that the Clinic needs a CDO to focus solely on how the hospital can best use the mass amounts of data it’s generating, rather than putting that responsibility in the hands of the person who also manages the technology.
Outside of the healthcare industry, this has been happening since the mid-2000s, when the CDO became a staple role in the executive offices of companies in the financial industry. Capital One, CitiGroup and Bank of America all have them, as do Equifax and AllState. Content providers like Yahoo! and Everyday Health have even added CDOs, and they’re being implemented in various government organizations too.
The FCC was the first federal agency to appoint a CDO in 2010, and the National Institutes of Health is now getting on board, announcing earlier this month that it’s looking to name an associate director for data science.
A few hospitals already have a CDO in place, although some may serve that function under a slightly different title. Seattle’s Children’s Hospital, for example, has a CDO who works on analytics that include “exploring factors that influence the health and care of our patients, strategic development and resource management of the hospital, the national levels of support for the sciences as well as economic modeling of Seattle,” according to his bio.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
As new pieces to the data analysis toolbox are developed, hospitals may need someone to take ownership of driving data-based decisions in the organization. Like health economists and chief innovation officers, the CDO will likely become an important new job in the new world of healthcare.
For more discussion on the rise of the CDO, head over to the Chief Data Officer LinkedIn group.
