Predicting Risk: Crime Analytics and Healthcare Security with Casey T. Harris, Ph.D.

All right, so let's move on to innovation through data.

So as healthcare organizations rely more heavily on data-driven decision-making, what opportunities do you see for using predictive analytics to strengthen security, resilience, or operational performance or outcomes?

Yeah, that's a great question.

One of the things that I think I point to all the time is that hospitals in particular, healthcare organizations already are gathering a tremendous amount of data.

And we think about ROI and predictive analytics kind of coming in in terms of responses to care, staffing, staffing levels, responses to certain workflows that you might put in place.

And I guess what we at Cap Index are big proponents of is bringing that same sort of data granularity and rigor to understanding security at the same time.

And then again, security for the people and the resources that are already in place at those organizations.

There's a lot of reasons why organizations are interested in looking at that from an innovation perspective.

Maybe it's premise liability associated with making sure that they're doing everything that they can so that they're not legally responsible for it.

Maybe it's reducing staff turnover because of feelings of unsafety or events that occur at those places.

That is a huge thing that we spend a lot of time with our customers talking through.

it's also understanding that a lot of the data challenges around prime risk are particularly problematic because it's messy data and a lot of organizations will come to us and say we try to do this ourselves and collect as much information and it's just so hard to standardize that and to actually forecast it that we need experts to come in and help us do that because our budget is tight we have limited resources for certain things like security, or we clearly have too many places to protect, which ones are the ones we need to pay the most attention to? And that's ultimately where this forecasting innovation is most valuable, is to help figure out where the lowest hanging fruit are to get the most return on those investments.

That's really what I've been brought in here at CapIndex about two years ago to do is to help that innovation process to give everybody the tools to do that.

Excellent.

Excellent.

And that was kind of going to lead me to my next question about what do you wish more executives did? we're asking in relation to data, and you and I were talking about this earlier, is I think a lot of healthcare executives are trained to look at data in regards to return on investment or their P&Ls or things like that, financial data.

But what do you think that people miss when they look at data? And you're right, they're going to you because you're the subject matter expert and they need your help.

But what do people miss in the data?

Yeah, I mean, I think there is a tendency to think of crime.

I mean, it's inherently interesting.

Everybody thinks that they know a little bit about it.

I think that demystifying the fact that crime data is available through organizations like CapIndex that can help you understand that, first and foremost, it is difficult to work with, but it's not completely missing from the data landscape.

And like most other strategic functions that a hospital is going to take, we want that to be objective, and not anecdotal, right? And so there's this tendency to kind of misunderstand what crime data can and cannot tell us.

We spend a lot of time here at Capindex, for example, telling you this is how we typically see our clients use this and here are our cautions about how that might be used.

So we should prioritize the objectivity where it's possible.