Bridging Healthcare’s Technical and Business Sides: A Guide to Cross-Domain Expertise

Let’s explore some of the technical and business capabilities that are becoming increasingly important in healthcare:

Key Technical Capabilities

• Data Analytics: Collecting, synthesizing and deriving insights from clinical, financial, operational and patient data. Skills like statistical analysis, machine learning and visualization are critical.
• AI and Automation: Applying artificial intelligence to improve workflows, decision making and predict outcomes. This requires skills in applying algorithms, natural language processing and robotic process automation.
• Interoperability: Enabling secure data sharing across the healthcare ecosystem. Expertise in APIs, HL7 interfacing with electronic health records and health information exchanges is key.
• Cybersecurity: Protecting patient data and care infrastructure from breaches. Skills like risk assessment, encryption, identity management are vital.
• Cloud Computing: Leveraging cloud infrastructure for security, scalability and efficiency. Expertise in cloud architecture, migration and management is needed.

Key Business Capabilities

• Strategy: Defining organizational vision, strategic initiatives and growth opportunities. Skills like market analysis, consumer insights and emerging technology evaluation are important.
• Operations: Improving efficiency of care delivery and business operations. Lean process improvement, project management and change management expertise creates value.
• Finance: Managing financial performance, reporting and long-term viability. Skills in budgeting, cost control, capital planning and reimbursement optimization are critical.
• Marketing: Building brand awareness, engaging consumers and driving patient acquisition. Digital marketing, campaign management and content strategy skills are key.
• Customer Experience: Providing seamless, personalized experiences across the patient journey. Expertise in journey mapping, customer insights and service design is vital.

This mix of technical and business capabilities enables organizations to keep pace with healthcare industry trends, optimize operations, manage costs, build loyalty and position themselves for sustainable success.

Here are some strategies to build well-rounded teams with blended capabilities:

• Assess organizational needs and talent gaps: Conduct workforce evaluations to identify areas that need deeper expertise based on strategic goals. Focus on broad capabilities rather than specific skills.
• Develop continuous learning programs: Create cultures of learning by offering training, rotational programs, certifications and tuition assistance to help employees expand their capabilities.
• Recruit strategically: Seek talent from both within and outside healthcare that align with needed skill sets. Prioritize adaptability and ability to apply skills to healthcare.
• Promote internal mobility: Enable internal transfers between departments and functions to allow employees to gain new perspectives and abilities.
• Retain institutional knowledge: Pair experienced healthcare professionals with specialists from other industries to balance industry-specific insights with new approaches.
• Use project teams: Assemble cross-functional teams for large initiatives to give employees exposure to diverse viewpoints and skills.
• Build partnerships: Strategically partner with companies or consultants to temporarily fill capability gaps while developing internal talent.
• Make capabilities everyone’s responsibility: Encourage all employees to expand their skills and perspectives, not just those in specialized functions.

Cross-training current employees alongside strategic hiring and partnerships can build complete teams. Ongoing learning and internal mobility programs also create pipelines for meeting future needs.

Let’s look at some of the top technical capabilities that are critical for harnessing the power of healthcare data:

• Data Engineering: Building scalable data pipelines, architectures and governance to integrate data from diverse systems. Skills in SQL, ETL, streaming, and cloud data platforms enable reliable data access.
• HL7 Expertise: Ability to work with HL7 standards for clinical and administrative data exchange between healthcare systems. Skills in integrating and normalizing HL7 messages are essential.
• Data Science: Applying statistical learning, machine learning and AI to derive insights from structured and unstructured data. Proficiency in languages like Python and R is key.
• Visualization: Transforming data into intuitive visuals like charts, graphs and dashboards. Expertise in tools like Tableau, PowerBI and D3.js brings data stories to life.
• Analytics Productization: Operationalizing analytics solutions for business users through dashboards, applications and products. Requires cross-disciplinary skills in data science, engineering and product management.
• Big Data Proficiency: Leveraging big data platforms like Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL databases for storage and distributed processing.
• Statistics and Quantitative Methods: Expertise in techniques like regression, simulation, sampling and experimental design to analyze data rigorously.
• Clinical Data Standardization: Managing terminology, code sets and ontologies to integrate complex patient data from EHRs / EMRs, claims, registries and other sources.
• Data Privacy: Ensuring compliance with regulations around protected health information (PHI) and patient consent. Skills in de-identification, encryption and auditing are essential.
• Data Strategy: Developing enterprise data plans, governing data as an asset and building data literacy across the organization. Requires both technical and leadership skills.

The most effective analytics teams couple these technical skills with deep healthcare domain expertise and the ability to communicate data insights to diverse audiences. A blend of data scientists, visualization experts, product managers, clinicians and domain leaders can realize the full potential of healthcare data.

Here are some of the most critical business capabilities to transform healthcare delivery:

• Consumer Experience: Designing seamless omnichannel experiences across the patient journey. Requires skills in journey mapping, service design, and crafting personalized engagements.
• Digital Engagement: Leveraging digital channels, content and campaigns to acquire, retain and activate patients. Expertise in marketing automation, social media, SEO, etc. is key.
• Culture Transformation: Driving organizational culture changes to be more patient-centric, innovative and agile. Requires leadership, change management and communication abilities.
• Value-Based Care: Managing population health, risk and performance in value-based contracts. Actuarial science, network management and clinical quality measure expertise creates an advantage.
• Financial Planning: Conducting long-range financial planning, managing capital and forecasting to enable growth and mitigate risk. FP&A skills like budgeting, modeling and cost control are critical.
• Contracting: Negotiating, structuring and managing value-based and risk-sharing agreements. Deep knowledge of regulatory and reimbursement landscapes is key.
• Virtual Health: Implementing digital care delivery models such as telehealth, remote monitoring and asynchronous care. Requires program design, tech integration and clinical workflow skills.
• Patient Access: Optimizing scheduling, price transparency and financial clearance to improve access. Skills in access center operations, revenue cycle and change management are vital.
• Process Excellence: Improving quality, efficiency and consistency through methods like Lean, Six Sigma and change management.
• Partnership Management: Building mutually beneficial partnerships and new care delivery and business models through strategic alliances and joint ventures.

Blend business capabilities with clinical expertise to humanize healthcare and meet the quadruple aim of better outcomes, lower costs, improved experiences and clinician empowerment.

Here are some emerging cross-disciplinary roles that bridge the gap:

1. Analytics Translator: This role connects data science experts with clinical and business teams to ensure analytics solutions solve real problems. They contextualize and translate analytics findings into practical insights. Strong communication, analytics fluency and healthcare business acumen are key.
2. Clinical Informaticist: This role combines clinical knowledge with health IT expertise to support technology implementation, data governance, workflow design and clinician adoption. They ensure technologies and data analytics enhance (rather than hinder) patient care.
3. Digital Health Strategist: This role develops consumer-focused digital strategies and platforms to provide seamless omnichannel healthcare experiences. They combine digital savvy with patient journey expertise and clinical perspectives.
4. Care Experience Designer: This role designs ideal care experiences by mapping patient journeys, identifying pain points and envisioning solutions. They blend service design thinking with process excellence and clinical workflows.
5. Value Architect: This role models financial impacts of various care scenarios and programs to identify opportunities to improve value. They possess a mix of clinical, financial, data analytics and actuarial skills.
6. Patient Journey Orchestrator: This role connects patients to the right care resources across the ecosystem to achieve health goals. They coordinate journeys through deep knowledge of patient needs, virtual health models, community resources and partners.
7. Medication Journey Mapper: This role analyzes the end-to-end medication journey to identify experience gaps andOptimization Expert: This role continuously improves healthcare operations and economics through excellence methods like Lean and Six Sigma paired with data analytics and change management skills. process breakdowns. They combine pharmacology expertise with analytics, human-centered design and operations excellence.

These cross-disciplinary roles provide the missing link between technical and business domains. Developing similar bridging roles can ensure healthcare organizations have the integrated capabilities needed to excel on all fronts.

Healthcare organizations should nurture technology-savvy administrative leaders by providing development opportunities such as:

• Job rotations through IT and analytics to cultivate data-driven decision making and familiarity with platforms and tools.
• Forward-looking education on emerging technologies and use cases through conferences, site visits and experimentation labs.
• External mentorships with tech executives across industries to share best practices.
• Leadership training and coaching with technology fluency woven throughout program design.
• Hackathons and code camps to foster curiosity and basic digital literacy.
• Immersive experiences in user-centered design and agile development to infuse human-focused and experimental mindsets.
• Partnerships with academic programs introducing business curricula for clinicians and technologists.
• Volunteering or committee roles with industry technology and analytics associations.
• Culture building initiatives that celebrate technology innovation and data-driven decision making.

With technology business training, leaders can set enterprise data and technology vision, ask the right questions, interpret insights accurately, link innovation to value and spearhead digital transformation.