su sandhu

Our guest on this episode is Su Sandhu. Su is the founder of Sky Blue Healthcare Associates, providing business insights and analytics support to healthcare clients by embedding client-side experienced consultants into internal BI teams. 

Su joins us on The Day One podcast to share what things in the industry she’d like to see banished to Room 101 forever. The main pet peeves Su describes are: the underutilization of existing data, market research for the sake of ‘ticking a box’ and fear of the next shiny thing. Su provides meaningful criticism during our conversation, and we hope you enjoy it.

Key Quotes:

• “What happens is that there's so much information that when something, a business question, arises or a business issue and something needs to be addressed, it's much easier to conduct another piece of market research than to go back and do a gap analysis and have a look. What do we really already have and what really are the gaps that we need to address?” (10:35)
• “It's for us to also think about how can we use data visualization tools to help us to really interrogate the data in a much easier way. So not just for Quan, but what about Qual? I don't think we've changed how we debrief Qual’s that much for a long time, and not just for each individual study, but actually bringing all of those studies together.” (12:57)
• “I think also internally it's really treating insights as a specialism, because having the experts there that know how to pull out those insights and can actually then import into that business planning process, I think is also key as well. Quite easy wins I think, that could be done.” (13:38)
• “I think it's really partnering with the internal insights people to enable them, because there's certain things that I think as an external agency, it's more difficult to do, and it's more about enabling the internal insights team to even be aware that it's good practice to start looking at some of the previous data and if they don't have that repository, that can be quite a big project” (15:33)
• “I wonder if, over time, as you say, this technology will just help to naturally resolve this problem, as we put our data into a central place which we can then have that kind of conversational interface, like you would with ChatGPT, for example. And you can just ask queries of your data and it gives you the answer. It looks at everything that you've done. So you know the data safe, you know where it's come from.” (17:22)
• There may be insights that we've already got that we're not going to get with another study necessarily, so there might be nuggets there that we're going to lose if we don't really use that data to the best of our ability. So I think it's being more impactful and bringing up time for the insights or for the commercial team to be able to focus on something else. (19:37)
• “What is it that I really need and what are we going to do as a result of this? Because if there's no time, or say, if there's no budget to implement any actions, then is there really value in conducting that piece of market research, or could that time and resource… be better utilized? Doing something different that's really going to help with that launch, rather than just trying to tick the box? (23:22)
• “Instead of AI, why don't we turn it on its head to IA – “Intelligence Accelerator”? And that really made me think because I thought that is so appropriate for our industry, for us as insights people as a community, that we're trying to accelerate taking insight from all of the data that we've got.” (36:18)

Key Topics:

• How Su got into the insights and analytics industry (2:10)
• Bringing her expertise in healthcare together with insights and analytics (3:30)
• What triggered Su to set up her own company? (4:25)
• Su shares a hilarious story from her time working in consumer testing (5:55)
• Su reveals her first proposal for Room 101 (10:00)
• The importance of a market research plan (11:08)
• Using data visualisation tools to interrogate data (12:57)
• Opportunity for agencies to move away from just one source of data (14:24)
• Will technology advancements help with a market research repository? (16:25)
• Su shares her second choice for Room 101 (20:52)
• Are we always using our resources in the best way, or are we just ticking a box? (21:55)
• The importance of having Insight people in campaign meetings (29:33)
• Su gives us her third nomination to banish forever (32:28)
• Will AI replace Insights teams? (33:37)
• What is Su’s advice for getting started with AI technology in the industry? (38:22)
• It is agreed that “the underutilization of existing data” should be banished to Room 101 (44:03)

About – Su Sandhu:

Su founded Sky Blue Healthcare Associates to provide business insights and analytics support to healthcare clients by embedding client-side experienced consultants into internal BI teams. Su spent over 20 years working client-side before transitioning into consultancy and throughout this time, has championed the use of data insights to help drive strategy and to make informed business decisions. She believes that having the confidence to challenge the status quo and influence decision making is critical in our roles within BI and, as such, we should have the ability to deliver insight-driven recommendations with impact. She recently delivered a workshop on this topic at the 2023 BHBIA annual conference and was awarded the John Wheeler Award for Best Workshop. Su was also a finalist in the 2022 Every Woman Entrepreneur Awards.

Relevant Links:

• Su Sandhu – LinkedIn
• Sky Blue Healthcare Associates - https://www.skybluehealthcare.com/
• Day One - https://www.dayonestrategy.com/
• Hannah Mann - LinkedIn

The Day One podcast is published by the Day One Strategy and produced by Zorbiant.

All rights reserved.

• Abigail Stuart – LinkedIn