The Forest and Trees is a healthcare data consultancy specializing in helping large multi-specialty group practices, integrated health systems, independent hospitals, and small/medium health systems.
Our overall philosophy is excellence through servant leadership. As consultants, our job is to serve our customers and make sure the job gets done now, while ensuring our customers have the education and skills they need to maintain and properly use the solution we create for them after we are done.
The Forest and Trees was started by Kevin Thornton. With more than a decade of experience in healthcare data specifically and more than thirty years of technical experience across multiple organizations and industries, I consistently see similar needs and issues, and I wanted to created a company to help organizations address those issues. I have a special interest and passion for healthcare, so I am focusing specifically on the needs within this industry – particularly since the needs will continue to grow for the foreseeable future as our population continues to age over the next several decades.
Within the healthcare industry, I have a seen a number of data struggles come up consistently that I want to help organizations tackle.
- Inconsistent reporting
- Differences in the same measure between report runs
- Differences in naming between reports
- Using the same name between different reports to mean different things
- Different ways to calculate the same measure
- Struggles meeting regulatory requirements
- Multiple data silos within an organization
- Undocumented, missing, or inconsistent data processes
- Lack of clear ownership of data (accountability or responsibility)
- Disconnected Subject Matter Experts
- Unprotected PII hiding in reports
- Former employees still having access to certain tools months or years after leaving
- Disagreements between different groups in how to store or represent data
- Paying for multiple sources of data that duplicate each other
- Paying for data services that are not being used or could be done separately cheaper
None of these are signs of a bad organization, just a busy organization that has grown over time, and are what I would consider normal growing pains. However, since they are so common and I have seen them so many times, I want to help organizations find and fix them.