3 Ways to Transform Healthcare Data
Hospitals and clinics are teeming with data, whether it’s operations and financial data or quality metrics and patient information. If your data is not helping you solve your organization’s toughest challenges every day, then it is a drastically underutilized asset. Would you let a brand new hospital wing stand empty? Of course not. Don’t let your data off the hook either.
Download this whitepaper and learn how to deliver outstanding patient care, utilizing next generation business intelligence tools—against the backdrop of unrelenting pressure for cost containment, resource maximization, regulatory compliance and safety considerations.
We've also pulled out the first several pages of the whitepaper for you to read. Download the PDF on the right to read the rest.
You work hard to cure patients every day. Is your data doing everything it can to help too?
Big city hospitals and rural clinics share more than the goal to deliver outstanding patient care. Both strive to accomplish this against the backdrop of unrelenting pressure for cost containment, resource maximization, regulatory compliance and safety considerations.
One of the most powerful levers to address these needs is to demand more actionable insights from your data. Hospitals and clinics are teeming with data, whether it’s operations and financial data or quality metrics and patient information. If your data is not helping you solve your organization’s toughest challenges every day, then it is a drastically underutilized asset. Would you let a brand new hospital wing stand empty? Of course not. Don’t let your data off the hook either.
Using data to uncover solutions won’t come from asking for “more of the same.” You need to put your data to work in a fundamentally more powerful way.
Healthcare providers are successfully tackling some of their biggest challenges – from emergency room efficiency and supply chain infrastructure to insurance payments and patient safety – by using a next-generation business intelligence approach. Three best practices stand out about how these healthcare providers are getting more from their information assets:
- Break the data access logjam by empowering departments to explore their own data
- Uncover answers with data from multiple systems to reveal trends and outliers
- Share insights with executives, doctors and others to drive collaboration
Elusive in the past, these practices are being put to use every day by healthcare providers of all shapes and sizes. No longer satisfied with limited impact from static reports generated by an overextended IT department, hospitals and clinics are transforming their expectations of data to drive actionable insights.
1. Break the data access logjam by empowering departments to explore their own data
For years hospitals and clinics have relied on IT departments to provide answers to data questions, creating a never-ending cycle of long wait times and inflexible results. IT has faced the inverse challenge. They spend dozens of hours churning out reports and responding to requests that often fall short of what the requester wanted to know.
Healthcare providers are turning the tables on this status quo, empowering individuals throughout their organizations to explore data to answer their own questions. Not only is this yielding faster, more insightful actions, it’s letting IT get back to the business of building and maintaining a reliable infrastructure backbone.
Clinics and hospitals have accomplished this by providing easy, intuitive tools to individual users. By creating a self-service model, IT and business intelligence teams are shifting away from reacting to business intelligence requests and toward training individuals and departments to ask and answer their own questions. Further, this access to data is established with full consideration of security requirements throughout the organization.
The result is less time from the IT department to generate reports and respond to inquiries and more data-driven decision making for the hospital or clinic.
2. Uncover answers with data from multiple systems to reveal trends and outliers
The need to do more with less carries extra pressure with healthcare providers because of the priority placed on delivering timely, effective treatments. How to reduce a patient’s time in surgery to accommodate more procedures in a day? Create a supply stocking system to optimize inventory? Determine where to build a new surgical center to maximize revenue? These are complex questions healthcare providers need to answer.
Now empowered to investigate information with intuitive tools, departments throughout healthcare providers are more aggressively exploring data that’s relevant to them. This is true whether the data is in a database, warehouse, spreadsheet or multiple places at once. This means more metrics, more underlying data and more relationships among this information than ever before can be considered to optimize their domains. Departments now proactively investigate patterns in data and work to understand why these exist. They are revealing major “ah-ha” insights that lead to recouping lost payments, changing vendor relationships, or even saving lives.
The impact of thinking big about what data can reveal is significant. Hospitals have uncovered underlying, recurring issues with claims processing that have let them proactively identify claims codes that need a different level of attention to be processed on time. Clinics have uncovered service providers who aren’t delivering effective services and taken corrective action. Physicians running studies are identifying patients who not only haven’t been adhering to protocols, but glean insight as to the possible reasons behind this to take action.
