Patients are expecting organizations to provide higher levels of service and more personalized health care while stakeholders insist that they be more cost-effective, comply with complex regulations, and remain competitive in the marketplace.

As the industry evolves, data analytics is proving to provide critical, practical tools to help organizations stay ahead of the game. Wherever they are placed in service, data-driven technologies consistently enhance productivity on the one hand and reduce costs on the other. Even more significantly, they have proven to help hone decision-making, boost revenues, and deepen the organization’s understanding of customers and their needs.

Timely, targeted insights delivered whenever they’re needed

Data analytics allows organizations to provide decision-makers with precise, timely, and targeted, actionable insights at almost every level, on-demand. From all corners of the organization—clinicians, technicians, financial managers, and more—data analytics can supply stakeholders with reliable, current, automatically-refreshed data. But that’s just the beginning of the story. Within the healthcare industry, analytics can be used to make meaningful improvements to efficiency, productivity, and responsiveness at almost every level, including:

• Operational efficiency
• Risk management
• Revenue cycle management
• Patient monitoring
• Quality of patient care
• Operations management
• Population health management
• Clinical variability assessment
• Patient segmentation
• Inventory management

The volume of data in the healthcare industry is expanding exponentially, and it is expected to continue to do so indefinitely. Studies show that more than 41% of healthcare executives report that they are managing 50% more data than they did in the previous year. There will never be a better time to take advantage of the edge that data analytics offers and to establish systems that will continue to elicit the power of data technology in the future.

Reliable, actionable, precise metrics boost profitability

By delivering reliable, actionable, and precise metrics and insights, data analytic tools can help healthcare organizations up and down the vertical spectrum—from clinical applications to financial, R&D, administrative, and operations—improve profitability.

Still, in spite of its promise, challenges remain. To begin, not everyone in the industry is familiar and proficient with data and analytics, of course. Many organizations don’t even have the infrastructure in place for a data analytics system to reach the entire enterprise. And implementation would require attention to precise rules concerning privacy, which would require layers of filters and controls to manage and process the data.

Predictive tools, deeper insights, greater profits

As a response to the ever-growing pressures of the healthcare industry, ClicData, Inc. and FTI Consulting have joined forces to develop HealthCare Performance Analytics (HPA), an integrated, cloud-based, data-analytics and dashboard solution. HPA includes an array of data visualization tools within an intuitive dashboard that is powered by a sophisticated optimization engine, giving healthcare organization executives deeper insights and more powerful controls of their productivity and profitability. The data analytics solution provides actionable insights through predictive models and data analyses of healthcare patients, partners, and products. This sophisticated solution integrates data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning to empower organizational leader with shrewd business forecasts, helping them to identify and predict potential risks and opportunities and give them the tools to respond effectively. There are three modules of the platform:

1. Labor Analytics

This module allows healthcare managers to interactively model, measure, and manage the labor and productivity metrics of their organization. With the help of proven metrics and tools that are customized according to each departments’ operating parameters and goals, labor costs can be improved and sustained through ongoing performance monitoring.

2. Provider Analytics

This interactive, cloud-based module allows users to analyze, measure, and manage a variety of metrics that impact provider performance, including physician productivity, patient access, and financial performance. It is populated with data from the organization’s core systems, including general ledger, payroll, practice management, and ambulatory scheduling data.

3. Perioperative Analytics

As the healthcare industry continues to surge in complexity and as opportunities offered up by the exponential growth of available data continue to increase, operations within healthcare organizations are called to stay abreast of developments and leverage the edge that their own data can offer them. It has never been more critical to the success of healthcare organizations that they utilize the power of sophisticated data analytics to stay competitive, current, and responsive, and meet their aggressive business objectives.

Dashboards designed specifically for healthcare organizations provide a cost-effective means to leverage that power. Within virtually every department of your healthcare organization, healthcare performance analytics dashboards can help improve almost every aspect of your healthcare operations.

There is no end in sight. In fact, it is expected to continue its exponential rate of growth. The good news is that, buried within those numbers, are insights that can point the way to better profit margins, improved performance, greater patient satisfaction, and boosted operational efficiency.

If not handled strategically, the volumes of notoriously complex data, fed by multiple disparate data systems, can miss what’s most important: the bigger picture and the path to ROI.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a data-based infrastructure that integrates strategies and technologies to analyze multiple data feeds and deliver insights to drive the business towards efficiency and profitability. It can help providers sharpen decision-making, accelerate revenue growth, improve operational workflows, and even uncover areas of lost revenue or waste that can be quickly rectified.

BI dashboards for healthcare organizations are an affordable and efficient way to manage your operations, helping you dramatically improve profit margins and the bottom line.

Using Big Data for healthier profits

When BI is applied to the business of healthcare, you can cut through the complexity and magnitude of the data your organization stores and produces and confidently sharpen your focus on improved patient outcomes, greater efficiency, reduced waste, timely responsiveness to events, and enhanced profit margins.

Here are three features of BI dashboards that deliver greater efficiency and performance in a healthcare management setting:

1. Precision

Many healthcare facilities still rely on receiving monthly reports from individual departments. But within the large and complex industry of healthcare, monthly reports are—simply put—insufficient to the task. Valuable, actionable insights that can help steer decision-making to more efficiency are often unseen or overlooked. You won’t be able to get high-level perspectives, like what’s driving admissions or how staffing policies affect wait times.

Those kinds of insights come from what only BI healthcare dashboards can deliver: cohesive, multi-level analyses of real-time data coming from multiple, disparate data sources enterprise-wide.

Instead of waiting for reports—and burdening your staff with the time-consuming task of producing them — you can use Business Intelligence dashboards to monitor customized metrics that you design to help answer critical questions: these are your key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs combine raw datasets from multiple departments and stakeholders and output comprehensive, unbiased insights that only that data can reveal.

As privacy is an important issue, business Intelligence can access data from patient health records without revealing HIPAA-sensitive information. It can also provide opportunities to analyze trends in community health, assess treatment outcomes, and flag patients who have a high risk of disease.

As efficiency is critical to the bottom line, BI allows you to save time and labor while producing superior results. Having better information means your team can focus on improving the quality of patient care and solving other problems rather than debating them.

2. Agility

As with any industry, and especially with one as extensive as healthcare, there will be easier-to-reach low-hanging fruit to address first. Standard and customized KPIs can reveal inefficiencies as they emerge so that you can respond in a timely manner. For example, if your waiting rooms are filled with patients with uncomfortably-long wait times, you can use KPIs to analyze your admissions protocols and decide to adjust staffing policies to account for peak intake times. Or, you can assess trends in patient readmissions, identify contributing factors, and make adjustments to improve care and reduce costs at the same time.

Once you’ve uncovered inefficiencies using your real data and the tremendous depth of practical analysis that BI delivers, you can take the strides you want to take to optimize your organization operations. Specific, targeted policies can be rolled out as needed when needed.

3. Support

Mistakes can be costly—especially in healthcare. Some of the most critical decisions are made in a matter of hours, minutes, or less. Getting current, accurate, and relevant information in front of the right practitioner at the right time can sometimes make the difference between profit and loss, or even life and death.

Sophisticated healthcare BI solutions deliver information via a mobile device, making access to crucial information more convenient than ever. Clinicians and specialists can much more easily share notes, diagrams, insights, and data and cut down on time spent on evaluations and unnecessary paperwork. Physicians can review test results and trends and be informed to more accurately prepare for and predict outcomes.

With BI, support can also be provided through predictive analytics, helping map patterns of disease, anticipate patient health outcomes, or even help planners determine where to build a new facility or improve the support of existing ones.

Seizing the moment

As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, healthcare dashboards can provide cutting-edge tools to help organizations get more efficient, more responsive, and more competitive. Instead of drowning in data, BI dashboards for healthcare can help organizations profoundly access and leverage their data to elevate operations in almost every way: streamline productivity, cut costs, respond more quickly to events, and improve the bottom line.

While BI may not be the only key to surviving data overwhelm, it can help you resolve longstanding issues that are slowing your productivity, weakening your budget, and undermining your profits. As demand continues to surge and technological advances continue to produce more profound solutions, it has never been a more opportune and necessary time to take advantage of the power of BI dashboards for healthcare.