Making Healthcare Data Work with Charlie Harp, founder and CEO of Clinical Architecture

[00:00:01] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.

[00:00:35] Hey everybody, welcome back to the Health Matters Podcast. Saul Marquez here straight from the show floor in Las Vegas. Today I have the privilege of hosting Charlie Harp on the podcast. Charlie is the founder and CEO of Clinical Architecture, an industry-leading healthcare data quality solutions provider. Charlie has over 35 years of experience as a healthcare software engineer focused on creating tools to better utilize and understand data. Charlie, I'm so glad you could be here with us today on the podcast.

[00:01:05] It's a pleasure to be here, Saul. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. And look, Charlie, there's a lot of innovation. There's so many interesting things happening in healthcare and clinical architecture is at the forefront of a lot of those things. Before we dive into the work that you guys do, can you share a little bit more about you and the work that you do in healthcare? Absolutely. I'm a simple country programmer. I've been developing systems in healthcare for a little over 35 years. I've worked in clinical trials. I've worked in clinical labs.

[00:01:33] I've worked with hospital systems. And throughout that journey, one of the things that I've ran across was the fact that the way we deal with data has issues and it's not sexy. And so back in 2007, I decided to start a company called Clinical Architecture, who was responsible for what we call the plumbing of healthcare. My marketing team usually doesn't love it when I say the plumbing of healthcare, but to improve the quality, shareability, liquidity of the data.

[00:02:01] And that's essentially what we do at Clinical Architecture is we work with clients like the CDC and large IDNs like HCA to help them make the most of the data that they have and that they collect from all over healthcare. Thank you for that. And data is certainly an opportunity, right, for organizations to do more, but oftentimes it's not clean. It needs to be better interoperable. And so the work that you guys do is important. What are some ways that healthcare enterprises could determine their level of data quality and usability?

[00:02:31] Well, the hard way is by not having good results. And that leads us to some of the ways that are also kind of hard, but they're better than the hard way. And that is you have to measure it. It's like anything else. There's no easy trick to tell if the data quality is good or bad, because if you think about it, data quality is made up of millions and millions of patients' data. And each patient has thousands or hundreds of thousands of data points and reports.

[00:02:55] And so to be able to determine whether or not the data quality is good, you have to evaluate the data for each patient in the enterprise, which is a non-trivial exercise. It's a lot of work. And what kind of challenges are really kind of showing up for healthcare enterprises and implementing initiatives to improve their data?

[00:03:14] Well, I think the biggest challenge is that improving the quality of your data is a strategic endeavor. And if you're a large ADN or you're the CDC or whoever you are, you've got the day-to-day stuff that you have to do. You've got to take care of patients. And so if you take COVID, for example, when COVID hit, everybody was scrambling to take care of sick people to make sure they had enough ventilators. And so when you start talking about lofty ideals, like improving the quality of your data, people are like, well, yeah, that's great. But this thing right here is on fire.

[00:03:42] And so one of the things we've tried to do is bring to bear more technology to help take some of the burden off of people. Because if you just leave it to people, which is traditionally how we did it in healthcare, you'll never be able to keep up with the work and get through the backlog of work of evaluating all this data. So the biggest challenge is just time and resources.

[00:04:01] Yeah, that's so insightful, Charlie. And for folks listening, maybe they want cleaner data and they're not having the success that they wish they could, maybe because of priorities within leadership or what advice would you give them? How can they start and how can they make a case for it? I mean, I think the bottom line is all these health systems in particular, whether it's life sciences, pharma, health systems, payers, they make a huge investment in technology.

[00:04:27] But if you think about it, whether it's analytics, traditional analytics or machine learning or artificial intelligence, or even a large language model, if you put bad data into those systems, they're going to create bad output. And so you're making these huge investments. People have to bite the bullet and decide to invest in looking at ways to improve the quality of that data. And keep in mind that there's two places where data comes from. There's the data you create and the data you get.

[00:04:53] And both of them have unique patterns and unique things you can do. The data you create, it starts by changing how you do things. And whenever you create data, any point in the patient healthcare cycle, you have to invest the time and energy into creating the quality data when you create it. And when you get data from somewhere else, you have to invest the time and energy into making sure that data comes in. And that investment is either a technology investment or a people investment or some hybrid of the two of those.

[00:05:23] Yeah, thank you for that, Charlie. And there's been progress in the infrastructure, in regulations, fire, bulk fire, right? All these things that are leading toward a promising future. What should or would have to happen in the future to make healthcare data more interoperable? I think when you look at initiatives like fire, and keep in mind, fire is an envelope. It's a better envelope than other envelopes we've had. But I can still send you a nasty letter in that envelope if I want to.

[00:05:52] When it comes to the standards, I think fire is a good step in the right direction. I think when you look at what's happening with Tefka and the QHINs, I think that's a good step forward if we figure out how to fund it. Because we've had HIE initiatives in the past, we had RIOs, we had clinical integrated networks, and they all kind of ran out of steam at one point or another because they couldn't figure out how to fund them. So we've got to figure that out. I think that when it comes to more interoperable data, I think people have to follow the golden rule of data.

[00:06:18] Because the biggest issue we have with interoperability right now is reconciling the fact that healthcare evolves from the edges, not the center. And so everybody out there, every hospital, every clinic is probably going to need to be able to create data from time to time because they're on the front lines of healthcare. So we can't just say everybody has to use this thing because if we say everybody has to use this terminology or this thing in every place in healthcare, you know, humans are capricious little buggers. They'll figure out ways to work around the system and you'll end up with unintended consequences.

[00:06:47] So you have to leave them the flexibility to make in the field decisions. And then they have to make sure that they are, with the data, when they send it to someone else to share it, they take the same care in doing that, that they would like someone that's sharing data with them. So I think it really just takes us to have awareness and have respect for the fact that the data is not just used for billing anymore. Somebody's life depends on the data that you're sharing.

[00:07:14] So we should take that into consideration when we share data. So some of it is just changing how we think about what's happening with the data. It's not just for billing. Yeah, that's fantastic. Some great ideas, folks, that you could think about in your own organization as you seek to get better with data interoperability, the use of your data. Charlie and his team at Clinical Architecture are doing some fascinating work to make that happen.

[00:07:38] Charlie, if you had a closing thought for the people listening to today's podcast, what would that closing thought be? I think my closing thought would be sometimes health care as an industry seems like it's slow and it can be a little discouraging at times, especially for those of us that have been fighting this fight for decades and decades. I think at the end of the day, the people in health care are heroes. I think they work really hard. I think they care a lot about what they do. And typically they're struggling in less than ideal circumstances.

[00:08:07] The closing thought would be is I've been doing this a long time, Saul, and there has been progress and there continues to be progress. And with the industry like health care, we are disrupt resistant. Even here at health, I think we're disrupt resistant. I think that success lies in deliberate incremental steps. And I think we're making those steps. So I'm optimistic. I think that we're moving in the right direction. We're starting to figure out that the data is important, which is, believe it or not, is kind of a new thing that I'm seeing in health care.

[00:08:37] And so I'm excited about it. I think this is a very exciting time to be in health care. Thank you for that, Charlie. Really appreciate it. And oh, by the way, I wanted to give you a chance to share. You also have a podcast. I do. I have the InfoMonster podcast. It is not only a fantastic and entertaining podcast, but it's also a registered sleep aid. If you're trying to doze off and you're looking for some help, the dulcet tones of Charlie Harp and guests will be more than sufficient to aid you in that endeavor.

[00:09:05] Charlie, listen, those baritone notes would definitely be very engaging to anybody listening. And the level of expertise that you have is certainly something that I think everybody needs to consider. So, folks, we will leave a link to Clinical Architecture, to Charlie's podcast. And by the way, if folks want to engage and learn more about you and your team and the services you offer, where can they reach out to do that? Clinicalarchitecture.com. Outstanding. Charlie, thank you very much for being with us.

[00:09:33] And folks, thanks for tuning in to the Health Matters podcast. Look forward to having you check out the links below and take action on what you've heard. Thank you, Charlie.

[00:10:14] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare-exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945. Thank you.