 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly we're with Wikibon.org, and this is the Cube, Silicon Angles production, live at the Tableau customer conference, we're here in DC. My regular co-host John Furrier is in California, he's got a personal commitment, Jeff is sitting in, Jeff is the lead big data analyst at Wikibon, go to Wikibon.org slash big data, check out his work and some of the other work from the community, siliconangle.com, where all the news is, and check out youtube.com slash siliconangle, you'll see the playlist from the Tableau user conference, and all the other events that we've done last year and this year and the years before. We did 27 events in the Cube last year, we'll do about 35 this year, there's a playlist on all of them, so check those out. You can tweet us, I'm at Dave Vellante, he's at Jeffrey F. Kelly, and the hashtag for this event is pound TCC Tableau customer conference, TCC 13. So thanks everybody for watching, Mark Jackson is here, he's a practitioner at Piedmont Healthcare, he's involved in the business intelligence and management reporting areas. Mark, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having me, appreciate it. Yeah, so it's going to be an interesting session because we're not only going to talk healthcare, we're going to talk sports, we love tech athletes, we call them, we've been called the ESPN of tech. Now don't get it confused because it's not Georgia Tech, you know, people might, being from Georgia they might be thinking tech, I actually went to UGA, so. Oh, okay, we have some of our team is Georgia Tech guy, so Danny Ryan, one of our CTOs is Georgia Tech guy, so, okay, little rivalry going on there. So anyway, welcome to the Cube, tell us a little bit about Piedmont and tell us about your role. So Piedmont is a five hospital system, we employ a lot of our physicians, we have a lot of affiliates, so we have a ton of data that's being pumped through our system and a huge need to analyze it and we've recently gone live on a new electronic healthcare record system and so that's created this huge need for analytics and the challenge has been moving off these legacy systems, moving on to these new systems, how do we keep analytics flowing, how are we able to deliver information to the decision makers and so there was a little bit of a void there which is how we ended up kind of moving into the tableau space. Yeah, so Jeff and I were, let's see, when was that, Jeff July, we're at the MIT Information Quality Event which is a chief data officer event which of course is a big discussion within healthcare which led to a discussion of electronic medical records, EMR and the whole notion of adoption and getting people to adopt technology as a key criterion to get funding, right? So I don't know if that's something that has come up a lot and is that a driver in your business? I mean technology is definitely key in order to continue to make progress in this industry, you've got to be able to analyze the information, it makes sense of it with all the changes that are going on from a regulatory standpoint, you have to be able to make decisions quickly, you can't sit and wait for somebody to produce analytics that takes 30 days to get it to someone and then maybe it's a month in aggregate and you have no ability to drill down so it has to be part of the solution especially in this environment and this day and age. So talk a little bit more about how you're using data and how that's changed, let's start there, what's changed over the last five years in terms of the way that your organization has used data? So I've been with PMOT, I guess we're going on four years now and I started out, I was- What's happened, what's changed the last four years? Yeah, so I can only speak to that. Well in my time there it was, I started out at the Hart Institute so it's our cardiovascular service line in the organization and I was the manager of the PMO there and I just needed a way to do my job faster, more efficiently, be able to drive insight, it was just too much, it was overwhelming with the sort of requests that we had and the amount of time that we had to drive those insights and so Tableau kind of came up as something I found in data visualization blogs and actually it was kind of a challenge to begin with because all the insight that I was driving was out of Excel so I would pull information out of these systems, put it into Excel, put it into these dashboards and I thought it a pretty good job of that and so when I saw Tableau it was a challenge. I was like, I could probably do better with Excel than you guys are able to do with Tableau. So I quickly found out that I was wrong. You blog about it? I don't have a blog so I probably should, if I had extra time in my day maybe I would get around to that but no, I haven't done that yet. So it saved me a ton of time, what might have taken me five hours of work now probably done in an hour and a lot of the follow up insight that you do takes no time because you can pretty much fully automate the thing and it's hands off at that point, you can just give it as a deliverable to somebody in a dashboard that has all these drill down abilities so really I'm not required to be this engaged and I can move on to driving new insights. It scales, a lot of people have been talking about scalability of data. Definitely, so that's one thing that's changed. We're seeing improvement in speed to insight for all of our users so we have 82 licenses for a desktop client right now and I just recently put in a survey and I've seen that it's around 25% improvement in efficiency so that means people can do in three hours what you used to take them for and I'm expecting we're going to continue to push that forward so if you put some assumptions around that and what you pay an analyst and the amount of time that they spend per week doing that analysis work, it's around 250 to $600,000 worth of work that we've reallocated from those resources to drive new insights so that's a key thing that we've done too. So you've got 82 users on there today and what's the head count of the organization? So we have 13,000 roughly employees which is about 9,000 FTEs. So what percentage of those or do you even think candidates to consume the product if I can call it that you're producing? Yeah that's a good question and honestly I don't know that I know the answer to that because I can't really envision how all this is going to play out in the end. I expect it's going to continue to grow organically. Right now we've got more than 400 unique users consuming reports through it and I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think we're going to continue to see that grow and potentially everybody in the organization is a consumer of information. So Mark we were talking last night a little bit about kind of your philosophy of empowering end users. Can you talk a little bit about that and so your job is of course to help your end users understand the power of the tableau and the visualizations they can use to do their jobs better. So you're building some visualizations that you're pushing out to them and then hopefully they can kind of take it from there in a sense. Talk a little bit about that, your philosophy, your view of that and why that's important to really empower those end users. What benefits does it give the end user and what benefits does it give to your group? Maybe in terms of more time to do other things or what are the real benefits to both parties? So we've kind of taken the same approach that Tableau promotes in their vision of democratizing data to the masses and that's really what I want to do. I want to tap into the potential that all of these smart people in our organization have and it's helped me coming from the Heart Institute side of things. One of the individual entities within the organization and start in corporate. So to see that you need these people with boots on the ground, the people that are living and breathing the problems need to be the ones that are solving the problems because if you're relying on a group in corporate to derive that insight for you, they don't know your problems necessarily. They're not sitting in the meetings where things are coming up. So the ability for that kind of group to deliver speed to insight is pretty limited. So you really need to enable people at all the entities and all the different departments, the people who have the problems, you need to enable them to be able to solve it. So that's basically the approach that we're taking and for my group we just have two people in the BI team, myself and Al who's out in the audience here. So Al helps me a lot with being able to train those resources. He has a Tableau doctor service where he pretty much runs that so he's a huge help. So our focus is a lot on building up these end users to be able to make them as good as they can possibly be with this product and be able to drive any amount of insight that they want to do without the need to have to come to somebody as a bottleneck to do it for them. So talk about some of the techniques I guess that you use to actually empower them to train them to get end users to really get the most out of the visualizations and to drive some of the innovation that they're doing themselves. Yeah, so I think you have to be a good salesman with anything. I mean, everybody's selling something. So as kind of the BI champion and organization, you really have to sell to different audience. You have to sell to executives. You have to sell to the people. They're going to be the producers of reports out in the entities and show them, sell them your vision to enable them. So after you've kind of hooked them in with that, you kind of show them what's possible. And that gets them interested. It gets them into the training classes that we do. So we do a four hour kind of beginner session and we teach them the basics of Tableau, how to build certain charts. They don't really come out as experts, but they kind of know what's possible at that point. And so then they go back to their desk and they see the problems that they're facing. They have their Excel processes that they run or whatever tool they might be using and they start thinking, well, maybe I could use Tableau to do this and they start giving that a try. And so that's when we engage in the Tableau doctor sort of service to say, okay, if you're having problems with this, you're not able to work it out. Let us come in, we'll come to you or you can come to us or we'll do a Webex. Whatever works is what we'll do to help you build it. So, and we constantly tell people there's nothing that we've run up against yet that we haven't been able to do. So come to us if you have a problem, if you don't think it's possible, we can help you do it. So we do that. We also do newsletters that we send out monthly. We have user groups that we do every month too, which we've had 15 to 25 people show up to that. And we're starting to do that via Webex too so people can join remotely instead of having to drive in to the corporate office. So it really sounds like very important to get them engaged. I wonder, so just taking a slightly different look at the question. So what are some of the biggest barriers to getting people to adopt a new way of really doing their jobs and visualizing data? Is it more of a cultural thing or is it they're tied to their Excel spreadsheets and that's just the way they do it? Is that an issue or what are some of the barriers? I guess it depends on who we're talking about. If we're talking about the people that are analysts, it's usually time. As easy as Tableau is and there's still, I believe, number one in the market in terms of ease of use in the BI space, business intelligence is still difficult. And people that are under tight deadlines are going to revert back to what they know. Even if it takes them longer, they're comfortable with that. They know that they're going to get the results that they're expecting at the end, even if it takes them 10 hours instead of three that they could possibly do it if they just spent some time learning Tableau. So that's the biggest challenge I think that we've had is just how do we free up some time? And some of that is a sales job. It's telling these people that you're going to get time back in your day. This is going to pay dividends. If you just spend some time, come to our training sessions, go out to Tableau site, watch videos. We have a four week training plan that we try to get people to engage with. And that was an interesting one on the survey too as I asked the question, how many of you have done the four week training plan? It's like 30 minutes a day. And I think I got two people that responded out of the 60 or so people that filled out the survey and said they had actually done it. Most people said they intended to, but I've done the survey eight to 10 months ago too and I had the same response and yet nobody's still going to do it. So that's the biggest thing I think is time for that particular group. Some of the, more on the upper management sorts of thing is the culture shift. So Mark, I got to, starting to interrupt you, go ahead, finish your thoughts. I was just going to say it's a culture shift for those upper management sorts of people who are used to getting reports delivered in a certain format. And they think it's kind of the end all be all of reporting and trying to shift them away to that to a new way of thinking about problems. So I got to ask you Mark, a lot of people, I mean, we're in DC, right? So the decade of Obamacare I guess, or at least part of the decade, even he calls it that so I can use that name here. But healthcare freaks a lot of people out. And a lot of people excited. What's the discussion like in the healthcare industry? What are people concerned about? What's freaking people out? What are people excited about? And how is data changing the game here? I think probably what freaks people out is the unknown. And I would fall into that category too is I don't really know what to expect. I know that things are shifting towards the negative with payer mix is not what we once had. And so your reimbursement rates aren't as good anymore. So people are definitely concerned about that. And you see a lot of the healthcare space. There's been a lot of layoffs and things like that. So that scares people as well. But the exciting part of it I think is the potential of what you might be able to do with the information. With all this push towards electronic healthcare records, there's so much opportunity and things that you can do with that. So one of the interesting things on the clinical side that we're doing is we're data mining our imaging systems. So we're looking for people that are potentially good candidates for valve surgery. So when you think about physicians, there's so much in the medical space that you have to keep in your mind. And people meet certain criteria that they probably should come in and be evaluated for a certain procedure. They're good candidates for this. But that stuff changes all the time. So we try to create these automated processes that will take what are the criteria that makes somebody a match for this. And we run it through our imaging system, we get results, and then we run that past the doctors who called for the study and said, hey, maybe your patient needs to come in for an evaluation. So I think it's helping us make sure that patients don't fall through the cracks. That they're consistently getting the best possible care that they can receive. That somebody's on the back end actually looking at this information to make sure their doctor didn't miss something. So, let's talk about HIPAA for a second. So HIPAA, we all know HIPAA, right? And it puts certain constraints on the business. But ultimately, does the democratization of data sort of outweigh from a value standpoint the protection or, suppose a protection that HIPAA brings you. Would you see attention there? And can data potentially bring new value? To that tension? Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can hamstring your business by fear of information getting out. I mean, I think- It's kind of what's going on, right? Today in the industry. Yeah, and honestly, HIPAA freaks people out, but at the same time, it doesn't say that you can't access the data to make business decisions. So, you know, I think it's just people are afraid of what might happen if information gets out. But so I worked for KPMG for six years prior to PMI. And I did, I worked in an audit function and advisory consulting. So I know all about these regulations and we went through Sarbanes-Oxley with all the controls around financial reporting. And as much as we did to audit that stuff, people still got away with fraud. You know, as many controls as you could put in place, people are smart. And if they want to get around your controls, they'll do it. I mean, what's to prevent someone from walking in and taking a picture where they're smart phone and that's not on your network as an IT person. You can't prevent information from escaping that way. How do you even detect that when it's not on your network? So I think you have to make a decision. You weigh the risks, you know, we put reasonable controls around things. And then you have to say, okay, we can't stop business as a result of fear. So you see information as more of an asset than a liability. Is that a fair statement? Definitely. Yeah, I mean, we were at the MIT conference. Again, I'll come back to that. And we had one guest on who was in the administration and he had this app, I think it's out now. Jeff, I don't believe you were there that day. You weren't there on day two. It was day two. But essentially it was your entire medical history on an app. You opt in, you know, which would be useful for everybody to have that. I mean, I don't have my medical history at my fingertips. I mean, imagine getting it, right? So that's an example where, you know, and healthcare professionals have said, well, you can't get that information because of HIPAA. And others have said, well, no, that's not true. So you see, you're actually trying to essentially change that in a way, right? With this democratization of data. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're a patient, you come into a healthcare organization. You expect, hey, my medical records are going to be with the hospital. And what I hope to see is that people are using that information to help me be better. You know, to heal me from whatever ailments that I have. I would want it to be locked up in some data warehouse somewhere where nobody can touch it and thus nobody can figure out what's wrong with me. Yeah, I mean, John Furrier just pinged me and made a point, great point, John. HIPAA was conceived before this data explosion. And so the architecture of HIPAA didn't have the notion of this big data at all in mind. Is HIPAA do-over in your opinion? Should we just chuck it and start over? Or, you know, because of this data explosion, what do you think? I mean, I think you as a patient, when you walk in the door with a healthcare organization, you kind of establish a contract with that organization and trust them with your information. So I'm not a big regulatory guy, you know. I don't think it adds a lot of value. I think it probably creates more problems than it creates at the end of the solve. So I would say it's probably not the best legislation. Well, I think, kind of, you know, touching on a larger point, and I've made the point, I think that as an industry, you know, both kind of the vendor community, but also, you know, businesses that want to make better use of data, we have to do a better job of kind of advocating for that because if it gets to the point where the legislators are taking over and writing bills, basically locking down all this really valuable data without taking into account the value it can provide, and once you get the legislators writing bills about that kind of thing, it's very hard to roll that back after it happens. But come back to the theme of democratization of data. Don't you think that it's all about getting knowledge in the hands of the consumer? I mean, if we as consumers of healthcare understand what data is available, what the possibilities are with data, how data is being democratized, then my feeling is that there will be a sea change as a result of that, but so many people are not knowledgeable. They're told, oh, you can't get access to that from me. Oh, okay, fine. Data's going to change that. Oh, it's almost like, it's almost like the data, access to data changed trading on Wall Street, and we completely changed that industry. Do you see sort of a similar analog potentially happening in healthcare? Yeah, definitely. I think it'll have a huge impact releasing the data, making it available to the key decision makers to affect the strategy of the organization so that, you know, you're able to quickly respond to the changes in the market. And that's the thing that legislators can't keep up with. So they write these laws, but they can't possibly keep up with all the changes that are going on in the market. They're not the smartest people on the planet that can solve all the world's problems and can consider every, you know, factor that plays into every individual market and all the exterior or other impacts that it might have. So I think it's going to have a huge and positive impact by putting the data in the hands of the people that need it. So you're sort of predicting, I don't want to put predictions in your mouth, but this, this being, you know, the democratization of data and the improvement of access to information for consumers will happen. It's a wish that we all three of us have. What kind of timeframe do you think is reasonable for that kind of vision to be seen? And again, what role will visualization play in that? I don't know. I try not to make too many predictions like that because I find them often wrong. Do you think within a decade or is that too overzealous? Do you think it's going to be decades? It's going to take decades to get there just because of the bureaucracy? If it, yeah, I think that there are a lot of people that have vested interests in protecting that information. Some of it, you know, might be internal politics of, you know, this is the legacy way of doing things and it might not be the most insightful way, the fastest way of doing it, but it's what I know. And so they have this stranglehold on the information and don't want to release it because they fear that they won't be relevant anymore and they're not willing to kind of move and learn new things. So I think there's internal politics as well as kind of the external things that are going on from a legislative standpoint. Great. All right, Mark, well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, sharing your insights on data, on the healthcare industry and maybe even making a few predictions. That's right. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back. Carl Alchin is our next guest. He is a practitioner with Barclays and we're going to talk about how Barclays is using data and his insights on data. Jeff Kelly and I will be back. This is theCUBE. We're live at the Tableau Customer Conference in DC. We'll be right back.