Are You Monetizing Your MDM Information Hub?

Enterprises with existing Master Data Management (MDM) programs will benefit by looking at some innovative ways to “monetize” their MDM data assets.  Most existing MDM Programs were launched with a mission statement that did not include directly generating revenue off of the MDM Information Hub data asset. Most traditional (existing) MDM programs were put in place to:

·         Improve the accuracy of data that needs to be shared between disparate operational systems and external trade partners by creating a Gold Standard master in that Info Hub.

·         Improve the operational efficiencies by automating the daunting tasks of validating, cleansing and integrating critical reference data that needs to be shared between operational applications and trade partners.

·         Reduce the business risks to the enterprise due to erroneous data on critical compliance and regulatory reporting.

 MDM Programs are expensive! A lot of investment is poured into them year after year and many are achieving their mission. The question for consideration…“Is saving our way to better profit enough or is there opportunity to increase revenues and boost the ROI of MDM investments?” Enterprises need help finding ways to monetize that data asset to enable more revenue generation in addition to contributing to savings and mitigating risk.  For example in the Health Care industry:

·        In the case of the ICD-9àICD-10 conversions.  ICD-10 opens the door to analyze medical procedures and protocols and their outcomes at a more granular level. As companies achieve meaningful use of EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) applications, more detail about symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, protocols, supplies, involved professionals, outcomes, ongoing patient vitals and re-admittance detail are available for analysis than ever before.  ICD-10 encoding provides a level of detail to enable more robust analysis.

·       This opens the door for performing more sophisticated Business Discovery and cause/effect predictive/prescriptive analytics.  As Healthcare providers seek to be a member of an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) the ability to identify areas of potential treatment improvement through predictive and prescriptive analysis puts them in a much better position to score well across the ACO scoring criteria as established by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).   Today, there are 33 measures for quality care.  Score well on these and Medicare/Medicaid will reimburse at 100% of defined eligible benefit.  Providers that do a poorer job in providing care (as evidenced by the lower scores) will receive less of the total eligible reimbursements.   This is lost revenue (revenue leakage).

Another area where advanced predictive/prescriptive analytics can be helpful is in finding root causes for data quality issues that MDM hubs are commissioned to resolve.  The goal is to improve the quality of the data (enforce MDM golden standard business rules) at point of original inception.  Move the MDM cleansing/Golden Record processing from a bulk-batch based method to an on-demand/transactional based processing method.   Predictive analytics helps uncover root-causes for poor quality and can analyze and predict which data elements will have the greatest adverse ramifications due to overnight processing lag times. This can be used to prioritize the most critical elements that should be moved to on-demand cleansing and gold standard processing.

Many MDM Programs do not have a means to analyze the overall enterprise data quality improvement of an MDM Information Hub over time. Nor do they track the changes/trends in the level of effort/operational costs applied across all of the data elements in the MDM info Hub.  Here is an opportunity to implement data warehouse, business discovery  and advanced analytics principles on top of their MDM business function (much like enterprises do for their traditional line-of-business functions such as Marketing Campaign Management, Sales Activity Management, Order Fulfillment, Inventor Management, etc.).  

Some enterprises are realizing the golden standard data asset within a specific information hub has intrinsic value to their industry. Innovation minded enterprises are finding ways to leverage their hubs to sell packaged, value-added analytics and data-provider services to other enterprises and service-providers in their industry.  In the Healthcare industry as Health Information Exchanges (HIE) gain adoption, care-provider enterprises with high quality information hubs will contribute to and take advantage of various HIEs to improve their ability to market services via the HIE open market by exposing/promoting their performance metrics vs. that of the local competition and/or global niche-provider/specialist competition.

Are you looking for ways to monetize your MDM Information Hubs?  Are you already monetizing your MDM Information Hubs? Would love to hear from you.