Why Data Analytics Is Critical To The Health of Healthcare
As technology and research continue to inspire great advances in patient care, healthcare organizations are under mounting pressure from multiple fronts—from patient care to profitability and everything in between.
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.