The chief data officer (CDO) plays a crucial role in healthcare organizations by leveraging data as a strategic asset to enhance decision-making and drive business performance. The CDO is responsible for data governance, risk management, cost reduction, and fostering a data-driven culture, while complementing the CIO's focus on data security and availability. As healthcare evolves, more organizations are expected to create the CDO role to navigate the complexities of information and analytics.

1. Eight Reasons Why Chief Data Officers
Will Help Healthcare Organizations
Thrive in the Future ̶̶ Steve Barlow

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The Role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO)
The CIO role in Management has
evolved over the years to become
operationally oriented, ensuring that
business data is collected efficiently,
securely and expeditiously, to get the
right data into a system.
The more important role of using the
data properly to guide business strategy
falls to the CDO, who advises business
leaders to use the information and make
informed business decisions.

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The Role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO)
Yet, 40 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner
said their biggest talent gap is coming from
the area of information and analytics, the
primary domains of the CDO.
Fortunately, 90 percent of large companies
will have a CDO role by the end of 2019.
Ralph Kimball, leader in data warehousing
and analytics, believes CEOs will hire CIOs
who split their budget between getting data
into and getting data out of their systems,
which also includes funding, recruiting, and
prioritizing this up-and-coming CDO position.

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The Evolution Toward the Chief Data Officer
How did the CDO role come about? It’s
helpful to see how the other roles evolved.
The CIO role was created because business
leaders were not trained on technology but
intuitively knew access to data was crucial.
The data boom created an abundance of
work for the CIO, not only to make sure data
was captured, but to guarantee networks
were operating securely and efficiently.

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The Evolution Toward the Chief Data Officer
Data is now so ubiquitous and available from
so many sources that it’s difficult for a CIO to
stay abreast of all the latest and greatest
technology and to make sure all data is
captured and secure.
A new role was needed to, not only fulfill these
responsibilities, but also to decide what to do
with all the data that’s been collected, and
how it can become a more strategic asset to
support better decision making.
Enter the CDO.

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How the CDO Fits into the C-Suite Mix
The CIO and CDO share some responsibilities.
Both are concerned with management, but the
CIO is primarily focused on getting data into
systems, such as the patient record, so it is
complete, stored, backed up, and secure.
The CIO makes sure the data center is
available and running.
In the healthcare world, he is less concerned
about secondary uses of the data such as
research and analytics.
He also makes sure data is secured in a
database for auditing purposes.

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How the CDO Fits into the C-Suite Mix
The CDO ensures that volumes of data are
integrated, optimized, and tuned for
analyzing millions of records at once.
The CDO focuses on analyzing data and
making it a valuable asset to help business
leaders discover insights and make better,
data-driven decisions about the market,
about their operations, and about
opportunities for improvement.
CDOs lead the charge to better leverage
information in a strategic way to advance
the business performance.

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How the CDO Fits into the C-Suite Mix
The CDO makes sure data is extracted into
new formats and integrated with data from
disparate sources to enable a full panoramic
view of information captured within the
organization’s data ecosystem.
The CDO ensures data is organized for
analytics, which is different from how it is
organized for single transaction processing.
Hiring a CDO is less about having a technology
and more about giving someone with an
analytics focus a seat at the corporate
strategy table.

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How the CDO Fits into the C-Suite Mix
She is more involved in helping define and
support a strategy rather than providing back
office support or a lights-on role where
effectiveness and performance are measured
by system up time, as is the CIO.
The CDO is measured by overall quality and
timeliness of business decisions that align
with the strategy she helps to define.
In summary, the CDO is concerned with
leveraging data as a strategic asset, while the
CIO is focused on ensuring data is stored,
available and kept secure.

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How to Recruit a Chief Data Officer
The ideal CDO is someone with a good
mix of overall business understanding and
strategy, with a foundation of technology.
She is someone who understands deeply
how to manage, analyze, and synthesize
data, to deliver insights and knowledge
that supports business decisions.
The CDO must be able to mobilize and
lead a team of analysts who will raise the
overall data literacy of the organization
and create a data-driven culture

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How to Recruit a Chief Data Officer
She has a good balance between an
operational and a strategic mindset.
She also needs a good balance of an
analytical mindset and a high EQ
(emotional quotient) to lead people and
drive the change required to create this
data-driven culture.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
The CDO contributes to organizational
performance in eight business critical areas.
1. Governance and Standards
2. Managing Risk
3. Reducing Costs
4. Driving Innovation
5. Data Architecture and Technology
6. Data Analytics
7. Meeting Regulatory Demand
8. Creating Business Value

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
1: Governance and Standards
Effective data governance includes
three key pillars:
i. Data literacy
ii. Data utilization
iii. Data quality
The CDO is the senior leader
responsible for all three pillars, driving
data governance and data standards.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
2: Managing Risk
As value-based payment models evolve in
healthcare, the CDO plays an essential
role in identifying risk, stratifying
populations by risk
The CDO help care managers and patient
case managers reach out to higher-risk
patients to prevent costly complications
or readmissions.
The CDO expresses comfort with
assuming or not assuming risk
based on population history.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
3: Reducing Costs
The CDO plays a role in reducing costs
by identifying waste presented in the form
of unnecessary procedures and
treatments, inefficient processes, or any
number of workflows within an enterprise.
For example, the CDO can make labor
data available to identify the right staffing
ratios by hour of day, by unit, and by the
level of caregiver needed.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
4: Driving Innovation
There are great opportunities in the up and
coming analytical methods and tools such
as using predictive algorithms, machine
learning, and data with advanced analytical
and statistical models to drive new innova-
tion in terms of care delivery, process and
quality improvement.
These fall into the data science realm,
which is under the purview of the CDO.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
5: Data Architecture and Technology
The CDO is responsible for data
architecture that supports analytics
decisions and the tools and technology
for the analytics process and function.
Once data is captured the CDO for how
to organize and architect the data so they
are accessible to knowledge workers and
analysts within an ecosystem.
The CDO stays abreast of new business intelligence tools, analytical
and data science tools, and can leverage those in the analytics
process with either structured or unstructured data.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
6: Data Analytics
The CDO is the leader in the data
analytics process with the core,
centralized team of analysts reporting up
through her business unit (most likely,
there will be other analysts across
facilities and/or business units).

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
7: Meeting Regulatory Demand
Many healthcare organizations have a
regulatory compliance team, but the CDO
can help automate reporting burdens.
The regulatory team often finds themselves
hunting, gathering, manipulating, and
creating information for submission.
The CDO can oversee the process of
making data available to the regulatory
teams so they spend less time gathering
and manipulating data, and more time
analyzing and submitting data.

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The CDOs Role in Business Critical Areas
8: Creating Business Value
Finding new ways to market and
deliver products is a big part of the
CDO job description.
She can leverage data to help uncover
greater revenue and cost-efficiency
opportunities.

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Structure of the CDO Office
The CDO needs to drive the three pillars of data
governance at the enterprise-wide level. This
should not be done at the business-unit level.
Additionally, the CDO needs absolute decision
rights around analytics technology to prevent
individual business units from acquiring
disparate business tools that can end up being
very expensive in the long run.
We advocate that the healthcare organization
establish an executive data governance
committee to include a COO, CFO, CIO,
CQO, CNO, and CDO.

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Structure of the CDO Office
The COO should chair this committee with the
CDO as the facilitator and their primary purpose
is to provide strategic direction and drive the
three pillars of data governance.
In terms of reporting structure, it works well for
the CDO to report to the Chief Strategy Officer,
Chief Operating Officer, or possibly the CEO
given a strong CDO who has created a strategic
place for herself to influence decision making.
Having her at the table with the senior
leadership team is a distinct advantage.

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Structure of the CDO Office
The CDO should have responsibility for the
entire analytics function. This includes four
primary functions:
1. Data acquirers
2. Data managers and analysts
3. Knowledge managers
4. Infrastructure support staff

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Barriers to Creating the CDO Role
CDOs have a place in the C-suite
for many different healthcare
organizations it’s just a matter of
scaling the position.
Regardless, their primary role
should always be driving the
three pillars of data governance:
data literacy, data utilization,
and data quality.

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Barriers to Creating the CDO Role
For the most part, the barriers to developing the
Chief Data Officer role will be political.
The CIO loses some budget and FTEs, but can
now focus on the capture and security of data
and making sure that the technology and
infrastructure are highly available.
The CDO can focus on making the data available
from an analytics perspective and driving value
out of the data.
Leadership, with the fortitude to realize the
importance of the CDO, will elevate the overall
analytics sophistication and infrastructure.

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For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Steve Barlow is a co-founder of Health Catalyst and former CEO of the company. He
oversees all development activities for Health Catalyst's suite of products and services.
Mr. Barlow is a founding member and former chair of the Healthcare Data Warehousing
Association. He began his career in healthcare over 18 years ago at Intermountain
Healthcare, and acted as a member of the team that led Intermountain's nationally
recognized improvements in quality of care delivery and reductions in cost. Mr. Barlow holds a BS
from the University of Utah in health education and promotion.