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Ngan Khanh MacDonald

Ngan Khanh MacDonald

Liberating data for healthcare | Leading change | Creating a community to enable augmented intelligence | Helping make data interoperability a reality

Using my experience in analytics, information management, healthcare reform, IT strategy, and business transformation, I lead projects, both large and small, in data, strategy, and implementation. Healthcare is in the midst of a technology and data transformation. My experience in both consulting and corporate enterprise data functions ensures a deep understanding of both what it takes for organizations to execute their strategy and how to leverage expert resources in the market. Data management and analytics go hand in hand to improve outcomes and communication is key to bridging the gap between technology and business leaders for enterprise alignment.

I believe passionately that healthcare data needs to be liberated and used to enable better healthcare. We have enormous untapped opportunities in healthcare where we have an embarrassment of rich data that needs to be connected and made available to patients and their caregivers.

What attracted you to data management or IT, and why did you choose to pursue this career?

When I was in graduate school for Information Systems, many of the design principles were about process and applications. How do we create information systems that managed operation processes and applications and preserve the data integrity? The data warehousing/data mining discipline was just starting, and I was attracted to the logic of creating data to answer business questions, not just manage processes and applications.

What has been your greatest career accomplishment so far, and why has it been important to your career?

We launched the Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine (I.AIM) in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only is it a much-needed role for us to bridge the computation data methods with human expertise, but we were breaking new ground. We are still building out I.AIM and it’s been amazing being back at Northwestern University. When I matriculated as a communications studies major, it never crossed my mind that I would be back here working on healthcare data. We are working every day to connect people, process, and resources. The technology is all there, and healthcare has an incredible amount of data, but we need to bridge the silos and make the data accessible to students and researchers in a responsible way.

What are the two or three biggest challenges you face as a data management professional / CDO and how can we address them?

One of the biggest challenges is to balance security and privacy with giving access to data to enable exploration and new discoveries from the data. We have really advanced this with recent technology innovations around de-identified record linkage. However, there’s always a need to know who the data is about and so we have to be careful that we have robust data governance in place so that the right people and processes have access to the data that they need.

A second challenge has to do with the fact that data management and data operations is not splashy. When you talk to a data scientist, every one of them will tell you that 80 – 90% of the work is in data prep and data quality. That’s because that is the hard work. If a data set is well-curated, it drives down this number. However, it’s not the fun stuff that people want to do. People want to build models and they want to build visualizations. They don’t want to profile data and do data standardization.

The third challenge is that people tend to think that they can buy a piece of software and that will solve their problems. If you don’t have good governance and quality data to begin with, the same old rule of garbage in = garbage out applies. Data management is about people, processes and technology is usually the last part of the equation. Getting organizational buy-in is still the hardest part of data management.

How do you see data management / the role of the CDO / IT changing in the next 2 – 3 years?

It’s important for the CDO and the CIO to be at the same table. I find that people think that they want a data-driven culture, one grounded in metrics, but it is hard work to define metrics, get agreement on data needed, and to correct data quality issues. Much of that work needs to be in partnership with the technology side of the house. There are great tools available that can help you find where you might need to focus time and attention, but at the end of the data, the data governance is about people and consensus. I see the role of the CDO gaining a more equal footing at the leadership table as companies move away from intuition and move toward using data to make decisions.

Do you have any planned next steps for your career?

Both my role at Northwestern and at HealthLX are ones that continue to expand and challenge me. I don’t see any changes in the near horizon. I have been lucky in my career that the next step tended to open up when I am ready for it. As long as I am learning and making meaningful contributions to democratizing data in healthcare, that’s all I need.

What is the single best piece of advice you have received in your data management / IT career so far?  Why has it been so important to you?

A long time ago, we were working on a response to an RFP, and we hesitated on the bill rate. We didn’t want to price ourselves out of the market. My boss slammed his fist on the table and said, “I guarantee that nobody is going to give you anything unless you ask for it.” That stayed with me. I don’t hesitate to ask for what I need. If they can’t give it to you, it is a good clue that it’s time to move on. Once you move on, it is important to not have regrets about what could have been. Why waste time speculating about what could have been different when there are so many opportunities ahead of you?

Can you share something about yourself as a person that people wouldn’t know about you?

People don’t always know that I came to this country when I was 7. I was one of the Vietnamese “boat people” who crossed the South China Sea to escape after communists took over. At that time, I didn’t speak any English. We were on the open seas for 13 days, 10 of those days without water. I’m not fond of frolicking in the ocean.

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