By Healthcare Facilities Today

According to Loraine Lawson, when we talk a lot about achieving ROI and the business case for data investments, we need to be playing the long game.

In her blog on ITBusinessEdge.com, Lawson quotes Colin Hill, the CEO and co-founder of GNS, a health care big data analytics company. According to Hill,  answering questions about a person’s health currently relies on a lot of experimentation and luck — and it's not cheap.

Hill says one-third of current healthcare spending is pure waste. It will take time, and there may be  a clear pay-off at first, but data is the key to changing that.

“Learning from data can help fill in these knowledge blind spots in a much faster, more direct way,” Lawson quotes Hill as saying. “As access to data and our computational tools continue to improve, we are using data to address the problems above, giving health plans and providers tools to deliver personalized, evidence-based care to healthcare consumers and patients.”

According to Lawson, it’s really the age-old IT argument about pursuing a strategic goal versus low-hanging fruit. The reality is, you sometimes have to aim for the low-hanging fruit just to get budget approval. But the real payoffs - the life-altering, business-transforming payoffs - those are almost always in the long game.

Read the blog.