Blog: Jill Dyche

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Clinton and Obama Debate Data Integration. (Who Knew?)

In which Hillary and Barack make the case for electronic medical records, and unwittingly pitch the inherent efficiencies of data integration.

Tihs isn't a partisan blog. I've been watching both the Democratic and Republican debates, and there are lessons for business all 'round. But there aren't always lucid links between politics and data.

So I was particularly rapt during last week’s Democratic Clinton-Obama debate at L.A.'s Kodak Theater (not co-incidently the home of American Idol, another popular circus), when our old friend Wolf Blitzer raised the topic of health care, speculating on how potential reforms would be funded. In her characteristic earnest and prepared style, Hillary Clinton advocated electronic medical records (EMRs) as one of the ways of paying for reform. She said:

If we had electronic medical records, according to RAND Corporation -- hardly a bastion of liberal thinking (audience laughter)--they have said we would save $77 billion a year. That money can be put into prevention. It could be put into chronic care management. It can be put into making sure that our health care system has enough access so that if you are in a rural community somewhere in California or somewhere in Tennessee or somewhere in Georgia, you'll have access to health care…. So we can begin to be more effective and more sensible about how we cover everybody, and use the money from the top-end tax cuts and from modernizing the system.

Say what you will about Hillary, what’s interesting is the way she made the push for EMRs as a way to gain efficiencies, provide greater access, and cut costs. So many of us are making the case for integrating data that rests in silos (and on paper) in our organizations and we've gotten pretty good at discussing the hows of integrating data--be it customer contact information, product calalog data, or patient medical records--but not the whys. While steering clear of the privacy and skilled labor conversations that inevitably accompany discussions of EMRs, Hillary did justice to justifying data integration.

As did Barack, also well-informed about the potential payback of consolidating patient records. But Obama changed it up, and literally: he advocated the need for change management in deploying EMRs, saying:

That's why in either of our plans...you know...if we want to invest in electronic medical records, then we have got to go to rural hospitals who might not be able to afford it and say, we're going to help you buy the computer software and the machinery to make sure that this works. But that investment will pay huge dividends over the long term, and the place where it will pay the biggest dividends is in Medicare and Medicaid.

Any data integration effort is difficult, skill-intensive, and time-consuming. It requires careful planning and rigorous payback analysis. But the two remaining Democratic candidates captured the crux of the data integration challenge in their EMR advocacy by making the critical point: it’s worth the effort.

Coda: For those of you who want equal time for the GOP, I watch those debates, too, so stay tuned!

Technorati tags: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democratic debates, data integration

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