Interviewed by Susan Sharer, EVP, FedHealthIT; Article written by Heather Seftel-Kirk
Recently we spoke with Kevin Davis, VP of Federal at Splunk, a company focused on making sense of machine data so that it is accessible, usable and valuable.
What category do your products fall into: Cyber? Interoperability? Open Source? Big Data? Telehealth? BPM? Or something else not on this list?
Our product is a big data analytics platform for machine data that can be successfully deployed to resolve a range of challenges from advanced cybersecurity threat hunting, to real-time IT operations assurance. Clinical use cases, including data analytics, are supported by leveraging interoperability strengths of the platform and search engine design features. Machine data ingested through Splunk is available to analysts across a breadth of job functions via distributed search capabilities, layered with a vast amount of visualization options with built-in machine learning.
What are the top 2 Federal Health Agencies you are currently working with?
Two of the most prominent Agencies we work with are the Defense Health Agency and Veterans Affairs.
What are the trends you are seeing in your space and where is the market going?
Digital transformation in the Healthcare world is ongoing and inevitable, as is the replacement of legacy EMRs and other applications. Data analytics will lead the way in helping Agencies transform Federal Healthcare, in the case of VA, enabling our active duty military personnel and Veterans to get the care they need faster. The increase in connected medical devices means a rise in data, and an extension of remote management capabilities for chronic condition treatment. Analysis of this data can yield hidden patterns and insights that will help revolutionize Healthcare – not just in the way personnel get care administered, but also in cutting costs and improving timeliness.
Data availability and analytics will transform the approach to medical practice – from being reactive to proactive, where prevention will become a focus. This will accelerate collaboration between various Agencies involved in Healthcare data collection/advisory, research and administrative duties such as NIH, CDC, DHA and VA.
The Healthcare system, as it embraces new technologies, will increasingly become a target for nation states and cyber criminals. This could add momentum to ensure that connected medical devices are treated as cyber-physical systems. Federal, state and local Healthcare providers could demand a baseline security standard be built into these devices. Security and privacy law driving compliance will be key.
What advice would you give to the system integrators and/or partners that hope to drive new opportunities in this space?
It is important to focus on the most impactful trends in digital health, to look at the many pressing needs. These include understanding and reducing cost, identifying efficient and high-quality providers, improving operational efficiency, managing and minimizing risk, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
An opportunity to substantially improve interoperability between structured, semi-structured and unstructured data sources exists, whether for clinical information, or record exchange. This is where our machined data analytics technology and embedded machine learning toolkit is focused on offering systems integrators unique opportunities to collect, analyze and visualize vast amounts of data in real time.
About Splunk: Splunk is a data analytics platform that can ingest any data from any source, at scale and in real-time, and have it available for analysts to derive actionable intelligence from these seemingly disparate sources through a single, central interface. Actionable intelligence allows analysts to uncover hidden patterns and unprecedented insights that can help them make informed and confident decisions to resolve challenges they face within their organizations. Splunk has been successfully deployed in the Federal Healthcare industry to reduce cybersecurity risk, keep critical Healthcare networks available, detect and reduce fraud and comply with various Healthcare regulations and mandates. Our platform has also been used to monitor clinical networks, clinical data flows and medical devices.
