Abstract
The Data Concierge service provides personalized assistance with locating data-related resources across Michigan Medicine. The data landscape here is vast and can be difficult to navigate. With the introduction of visual tools like Tableau, data and analytics are becoming decentralized with more than 60 separate departmental teams identified to date.
The Data Concierge service unites these data providers in a collaborative community. Using standardized services, tools, and work flows, participating teams are empowered to more easily locate and understand data owned by others. We created a means for participants to ask and answer data-related questions with the resulting shared knowledge captured for the benefit of others.
With the COVID-19 outbreak, our service framework was the perfect foundation for a coordinated response to the sudden urgent need for data. We quickly adapted when our leadership directed all COVID-19 related data requests be triaged, assigned and tracked by the Data Concierge service. We went from an average of five requests per month to twenty.
For the first few months of the crisis, everything about COVID-19 data changed very quickly. The Data Concierge became a hub for information, openly communicating these changes so all the different teams were collecting and interpreting the data in the same way. We fostered the development of best practices and united disparate teams so they could work together on similar projects. Daily efforts culminated into a virtual community meeting every Friday with more than 130 people on the call. Data was required not only for internal use, but also State and Federal reporting.
The Data Concierge service provided critical support for data and analytics during the COVID-19 crisis, ultimately contributing to the successful response by Michigan Medicine.