Member Article

Healthcare: 5 tips for data analytics user adoption

Data analytics has significant potential to improve the performance of an organisation, however some companies struggle to envision the expected benefits. User adoption of new technology implementations can often present major challenges and frequently becomes the main barrier to success. In turn, a lack of user adoption severely undermines the value an organisation can gain from a genuinely innovative project.

In the fast-paced, high-stress environment of front line healthcare, this challenge couldn’t be greater so we’ve developed some top five tips to encourage user adoption and get started with data analytics…

User-friendly design

It’s probably not a great surprise that user-friendly, intuitive design is critical. The correlation between user friendliness and successful adoption was the single strongest factor across all stakeholders. Think carefully about the design of your analytical dashboards – make it clear and intuitive to ensure strong adoption.

Management support

Proactive and vocal support for analytics and BI programs from senior management is key. This is often replicated in discussions around change management, where ‘walk the talk’ is necessary for encouraging wider adoption amongst your team.

Data quality

If the data lacks trust amongst your team, adoption will suffer significantly. Data quality is a challenging and often conflicting discussion point within healthcare. Poor data quality leads to poor adoption; but from real-world experience, transparency and a degree of tolerance will naturally breed more accurate, trustworthy data.

Stakeholder engagement

Without early engagement, projects typically suffer from poorly defined success measures and lack the necessary capabilities. As a result, adoption suffers. To avoid this pitfall, include a wide user population in all phases of the project, as early as possible. The aim of early stakeholder engagement is to understand current processes and work to define a value-based model, as opposed to delivering features and capabilities which are often superfluous.

Clear vision

As a BI initiative is driven by business a strategic business vision is needed to direct the implementation effort. Long term vision, primarily in strategic and organisational terms is needed to enable the established of BI business case. The business case must be aligned to the vision because it would eventually impact the adoption and outcome of the BI system. A solid business case would provide justifiable motivations for adopting a BI system to change the existing reporting and analytical practices.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by David Bolton .