Healthcare professionals need access to decision support tools that deliver the right information, at the right time. In a busy healthcare facility, where countless decisions are made on a daily basis, it is crucial that any analytical tools provided actually yield useful decision support to the target customer. In this episode, I talked to Karl Hightower from Novant Health about how he and his team define “quality” when it comes to data products, and what they do to meet that definition in their daily work. Karl Hightower is the Chief Data Officer and SVP of Data Products at Novant Health, a busy hospital and medical group in the Southeast United States with over 16 hospitals and more than 600 clinics. Karl and I took a deep dive into data product management, and how Karl and his team are designing products and services that help empower all of the organization’s decision makers. In our chat, we covered:

• How a non-tech company like Novant Health approaches data product management
• The challenges of designing data products with empathy in mind while being in an environment involving physicians and healthcare professionalsThe metric Karl’s team uses to judge the quality and efficacy of their data products, and how executive management contributed to defining this success criteria
• How Karl encourages deep empathy between analytics teams and their users by deeply investigating how the users being served by the team make decisions with data
• How and why Novant embraces design and UX in their data product work
• The types of outcomes Karl sees when designers and user experience professionals work with analytics and data science practitioners.
• How Karl was able to obtain end user buy-in and support for ?
• The strategy Karl used to deal with a multitude of “information silos” resulting from the company’s numerous analytics groups.

 

Resources and Links:

• Novant Health website: https://www.novanthealth.org/
• Novant Health LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/novanthealth/
• Karl Hightower LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-hightower-4528123/

Quotes from Today’s Episode

“I tend to think of product management as a core role along with a technical lead and product designer in the software industry. Outside the software industry, I feel like product management is often this missing hub. ” - Brian

 

“I really want to understand why the person is asking for what they're asking for, so there is much more of a closer relationship between that portfolio team and their end-user community that they're working with. It's almost a day-to-day living and breathing with and understanding not just what they're asking for and why are they asking for it, but you need to understand how they use information to make decisions.” - Karl

 

“I think empathy can sound kind of hand-wavy at times. Soft and fluffy, like whipped cream. However, more and more at senior levels, I am hearing how much leaders feel these skills are important because the technology can be technically right and effectively wrong.” - Brian

 

“The decision that we got to on executive governance was how are we going to judge success criteria? How do we know that we're delivering the right products and that we're getting better on the maturity scale? And the metric is actually really simple. Ask the people that we're delivering for, does this give you what you need when you need it to make those decisions? - Karl

 

“The number one principle is, if I don't know how something is done [created with data], I'm very unlikely to trust it. And as you look at just the nature of healthcare, transparency absolutely h