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HPR15 Recap: Using Data Analytics to Improve Healthcare Outcomes

At the Hospital and Physician Relations Executive Summit in Scottsdale, AZ, we attended a lot of great sessions. There was one in particular that we thought would paint a very clear picture of how data analytics can improve healthcare and decrease costs. John Gillespie, MD, MMM of Palladian Health and Joseph A. Eberle, Managing Director of Data Analytics at Computer Task Group gave us an hour packed with great information about their analytics experience. We’ve summarized it in as small of a nutshell as we could muster, without leaving out any of the good parts. The Healthcare Roadblock If a patient has a chronic disease, they get tested, diagnosed and then they opt to receive the treatment. To a doctor, that is a logical flow of care but at Palladian Health it wasn’t occurring that way. Many patients were diagnosed and then didn’t comply with the treatment plan. The result was lower treatment rates, higher readmissions and increased healthcare expense. To solve the mystery that seemed so logical to health care professionals, they took a closer look at the patient data. The Data and Analysis Through a grant, a multi-year project began to put in place a data analytics platform that […]

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SmartBase Run-Ins with Kevin Garnett

SmartBase Run-Ins with Kevin Garnett

If you’re Minnesotan and not living under a rock, you probably already know that Kevin Garnett has returned to the Timberwolves after his 8 year hiatus from MN basketball. From the day KG signed with the Timberwolves in 1995 (check out those shirts! ^^ [Photo credit: KSTP.com]), Minnesotans have been collecting Garnett stories from run-ins with the always friendly and mostly goofy power forward. In honor of his return to the Timberwolves and his first game back tonight against the Washington Wizards, we’d like to share a few of our own “KG stories” from SmartBase employees. “One night, I was taking the family out to dinner at Manny’s Steakhouse. Kevin Garnett walked in with a group of his friends to have dinner. This was back in KG’s early years with the Timberwolves, so he and his friends were pretty young and having a good time. One of my family members asked Kevin for an autograph. He was so friendly and nice, he said yes right away and signed a napkin. When we looked at the napkin, it said ‘Stay Sweat, Kevin Garnett’. Okay, so he might not have been the best speller, but it did turn into one of the […]

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The Evolution of Channel Marketing: Strategies to Win – A Recap

Channel Marketing has been grappling many challenges within the last few years. As a member of Business Marketing Association Minnesota, I moderated a panel discussion this week with four marketing executives from well-known corporations. My job was to facilitate a conversation about this evolution in channel marketing. The panel discussed their channel challenges and the steps they have taken to overcome them. Here are the highlights:   Chris Hawver – Director of Channel Marketing, Seagate Technology When it comes to the channel, I haven’t seen a whole lot that’s really new. For example, most people when asked how they do their channel marketing will say they do trade shows, golf events, and dinners with their partners. When asked about lead generation, they have the same answer. In my experience, channel partners don’t have the resources or the skill sets to do successful demand generation. Because of this, vendors will push out campaigns, webinars and direct mail “in a box”. One way I believe you can achieve success in channel marketing is for vendors to stop pushing these campaigns out to their partners. Instead, they should pull the partners in by generating leads and supporting the sales process. Knowing your segments, […]

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The Imitation Game: Solving Big Data Problems in the 1940’s

This past weekend, I watched a movie called The Imitation Game. If you haven’t seen a trailer, you can watch it below. There were millions of combinations to check to decrypt the messages making the task almost impossible. In the movie, Alan Turing, a math genius, created a machine that could check each of the permutations until it found the correct one for that day, allowing the British to decrypt the Nazi messages. This intelligence allowed them to position Britain and their allies to win the war. Yep, you guessed it – the machine, which was actually called a Bombe, was a very early version of the computer. Why am I writing about this? Great question. Essentially, the group at Bletchley Park was dealing with a big data problem – even though their idea of “big data” is a fraction of what we process today. There was a continuous stream of messages to decode and they had to decode them using the encryption key found by the Turing machine. Hence, lots of data. When Turing first started his machine, it ran and ran, checking each of the permutations faster than any human or team of humans could. Unfortunately, there were too […]

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Top 5 Data Driven Marketing Predictions for 2015

As I reflect on 2014 and the experiences that SmartBase has had, there are many trends that we, as a group have seen. I think it’s important to share personal insights to improve the strength of the marketing community as a whole, so I wanted to pass along the knowledge that we’ve gained over the last year. Here are our top 5 data driven marketing trends that we see continuing or evolving into 2015. #5: Data Security Will be C-Suite’s Top Priority – The number of ways organizations collect data is increasing. Whether it’s online, in the consumers’ wallets, on their smart phones or even at the corporate level, the increased number of entry points is also increasing the ways that data breaches can occur. Where top notch security has been required of healthcare organizations by compliance laws like HIPAA for years, more industries will seek a higher level of security to protect their customers and their companies. Also, notice that I say C-Suite, not CIO or CEO. Data security is everyone’s problem in 2015. #4: Consumers are not giving up driver’s seat of the Health Care industry – [Part 1 & 2] Part 1: Consumers are gaining control over their health […]

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The Challenge of Choosing: Qualitative Research Reveals Senior Attitudes about Medicare

December is full of deadlines. Companies have to tie up business for year end, employees have to choose or augment healthcare plans and the man in the red suit has to finish his nice and naughty list. The holiday season adds more stress to these important end of year decisions. By December 7th, seniors, age 65+, had to make changes to their Medicare plans for the 2015 year. People new to the senior cohort just finished sorting through the Medicare plans for the first time. How did they do? This is the type of information gathered from focus groups, in depth interviews and other qualitative research methods. [ Not sure which research methods fit your needs? Download our Qualitative vs. Quantitative Guide to learn more! ] When conducting qualitative research, seniors might be asked questions like “How do you like your health insurance plan?” One trend I’ve seen is that a typical answer is along the lines of “I don’t know”. For most seniors, that answer won’t change until they’ve used the plan they’ve selected. This could be months down the road. So why don’t seniors know if they chose the right plan for them? What’s missing? Likely it is […]

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Tying Marketing to Revenue: The Titan of Marketing Challenges

Silos. Vacuums. Disparate systems. Whatever you want to call them, they are tall pillars that create a barrier to quantifying the Marketing ROI for any company. Without the destruction of these silos and integration of systems and structuring of data, Omni-Channel Marketing will be impossible. I’ve worked in organizations where the data comes in from the marketing efforts – email sends, social media interactions, website analytics, etc. – and there is zero way of tying it to the revenue stream. The best we could do was examine the product or service in the marketing campaign and compare it to the revenue that came in within that time frame from that product or service. This loose way of proving the worth of marketing is how most organizations work – and it is A LOT of work without the right tools. Looking at separate systems, digging through names and trying to manually tie revenue and marketing together. It’s a mess and one of the biggest marketing challenges organizations face. Does this ring true for you? Great. Dump that old way of doing things. Let’s talk more about Omni-Channel. The very idea of bringing all of the data from internal and external sources […]

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Avoid Becoming the Next Headline: A Look at Network Security’s Biggest Hole

Target, Home Depot, Jimmy John’s, Best Buy, Dairy Queen. All of these companies have been hit by security breaches in the last year. These huge profitable companies have teams of people who are overseeing the data and technology in the company and there are still holes in data security. IBM conducted a study based on the organizations that they monitor that showed there is a 12% increase in security events year over year. So, the question is… Who will be next on the list? How much private information will be stolen? How will it impact the organization and the clients? But most importantly, you need to be asking “How can I avoid being the next headline?” There are many layers and levels to security, depending on the compliance standards that need to be met. One major hole I see in companies is absence of full traceability of their data. Tracing the Data Think about the way data flows in your organization today. From the corporate network to your laptop, from your smartphone to the cloud and back. Data breach statistics show the movement of data is rapidly accelerating – and it’s no wonder! Enterprise is enabling this free flowing transfer […]

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TED@IBM – How Big Data is Improving Healthcare

This statistic blew me away: A single patient in one day can generate 100 million data points. Think of the number of patients in a given hospital. If you have 300 patients in a hospital at a given time, that is 30 TRILLION data points per day. What is happening to all of that data? I would guess 90% of it isn’t used or even looked at. Could that data be better used to provide better care in real-time? That was the topic of IBM’s Inhi Cho Suh at the TED@IBM conference last week. In her example of how big data can be used to transform healthcare, she talks about intensive care units. The many systems and machines running at one time surround the patient with white noise and interruptive alarms. She explains that alarms were once necessary for the doctors to provide care, but today, 90% of alerts and alarms are inactionable. So, how can hospitals better use the data they’re collecting? How can doctors provide better care without spending hours and hours collecting and analyzing data from all of the different monitoring systems? Suh explains that with power stream computing, this data analysis in real-time is possible and […]

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