Four ways data is improving healthcare operations. Lower cost, better care.
The healthcare industry now has more data than ever. It can be challenging to corral and understand massive amounts of data from a variety of systems. There’s data from patient care, supply chain, insurance billing, compliance, operations and the list goes on. And there’s often variance and disparity within each of those buckets.
But when the right sources are streamlined and analysed properly data can be a huge asset helping drive operational efficiencies and better patient outcomes. Just take a look at these four ways data can improve everything from population health management to revenue cycle management.
1. ENABLING POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT WITH SELF-SERVICE ANALYTICS:
Self-service analytics empowers both individual healthcare employees and entire enterprises to see and understand data across every system operational, financial, and clinical.
With direct access and the ability to explore population risk stratification data, physicians, clinicians, and care coordinators can monitor, measure, and understand the risk and financial implications of his or her treatment protocols and decisions on a per-patient basis.
2. INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY WITH REAL-TIME ANALYTICS:
Whether data is from this year, this week, or a few minutes ago, there’s no doubt reliable data will elevate operational efficiency. In order to drive decisions at the speed of business, data must be current. Proactive healthcare organizations are turning to right-time data feeds to improve decision-making, and track costs and outcomes as they go. Standardization of staffing with real-time data allowed physicians to focus their attention on one patient-centered activity at a time.
3. AGGREGATING AND BLENDING DATA TO UNCOVER INEFFICIENCIES IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN:
Healthcare organizations accumulate massive amounts of data that’s stored in silos across the entire enterprise. These silos make it difficult to spot savings opportunities in the thousands of daily supply chains. Connecting these islands of information is key to understanding the big picture and making smarter buying decisions. The ability to aggregate and blend data on a common field is key.
From drugs and medical devices to equipment and business assets, hospitals have huge inventories to manage. With data disjointed and supply and demand for thousands of different items always in flux, decision-makers are prone to wild and inefficient purchasing (known as maverick-buying) outside of the standard processes.
4. AUTOMATING AD HOC VISUAL ANALYSIS FOR BETTER REVENUE CYCLE MANAGEMENT:
Spreadsheets are the wrong tool for ad hoc financial reporting in healthcare. Too often, mistakes are made at the expense of efficiency, accuracy, and even thousands of hours of lost time. Augmenting financial analysis with automated data visualization can take a four-hour process involving many tools and high level expertise and turn it into a four-second query.
Data visualization allows us to quickly automate processes that used to take thousands literally thousands of hours into seconds.
IMPROVING HEALTHCARE OUTCOMES WITH DATA
Successfully adopting the Accountable Care Organizations model, complying with new healthcare-industry mandates, and maximizing reimbursements all requires operational excellence. Monitoring, measuring, and analyzing data to improve patient safety, care quality, operational costs, and compliance is easier than you think. And integrating self-service data visualization into your healthcare operations and processes is even easier.
