CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sage Growth Partners, a research firm that accelerates commercial success for growth-minded health organizations, today released recent findings from its first Market Report on Data Analytics. Commissioned by InterSystems, an innovative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical information challenges, the study surveyed 100 healthcare organization executives to identify the most common data obstacles and how to address them. According to the research, only 20 percent of those surveyed fully trust the data they rely on to make decisions.

Despite the progress made in healthcare IT over the past decade, hospitals and health systems continue to struggle with the collection, normalization, analysis, and application of data to make timely clinical and business decisions. The report revealed that 85 percent of organizations saw data analytics priorities as fundamental to achieving broader strategic objectives. Furthermore, more than half of respondents stated that poor data quality has serious consequences and can lead to ineffective or slow decision making (53%) and the inability to identify gaps in care (50%).

“Sage’s survey findings are consistent with what we hear from health systems,” said Fred Azar, Analytics Executive at InterSystems. “Executives acknowledge that poor data impedes enterprise decision making and their ability to identify gaps in care, and that data integration and interoperability is a significant barrier to their analytics strategy."

Additional key findings include:

Data integration and interoperability is by far the biggest barrier to achieving strategic data analytics priorities in the coming year according to 51% of respondents.
High-quality data is a top strategic priority, yet most (80%) don’t fully trust their data.
Creating and sharing high-quality data across their organization is the top short-term and long-term strategic priority (80% within the next 12 months, 84% within the next 36 months).
About half of respondents say data and data management challenges impact their data and analytics teams by creating long delays, difficulty scaling and democratizing data, and limited time to analyze the data.
“There is an enormous amount of health data in today’s digital world, which is growing daily because of the increasing use of wearables and health apps that collect and share health data,” said Stephanie Kovalick, Chief Strategy Officer at Sage Growth Partners. “The potential that exists if this information can be leveraged in managing people’s health is also enormous. However, all this information quickly loses its value if there isn’t a way to appropriately apply the data. As reflected in our study, without reliable, clean, and actionable data, organizations are left with an exorbitant amount of data wasted that otherwise could be used to inform critical, life-saving clinical decisions.”

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