Why Data Analytics is Necessary in Healthcare

While medical breakthroughs continue to offer astounding advances in patient care, there has never been more pressure on to the health care industry to provide higher levels of service, respond to demands for more personalized health care, be more cost-effective, comply with mounting regulations, and stay competitive in the marketplace—all while meeting profit objectives.

Within this radically and rapidly evolving landscape, data analytics can offer some of the most potent and practical tools to stay ahead of the curve. Wherever it is implemented, data-driven technologies have proven to consistently improve productivity and reduce costs. But more, their presence helps to sharpen decision-making, increase revenues, and enhance understanding of customers and their needs.

Relevant, precise, and time-sensitive data at your fingertips

In short, analytics can put relevant, precise, and time-sensitive data at the fingertips of those that need it, when they need it. Clinics, hospitals and health professionals need to stay focused with metrics that are automatically refreshed whenever data changes. But more, in a modern health care setting, analytics can be used to make significant improvements in an enormous array of metrics, including:

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

The volume of data in the healthcare industry is expected to continue expanding at an unprecedented rate. Studies show that over 41% of healthcare executives report that the amount of data their organizations manage has grown by more than 50% in the last year. As a result, the opportunity has never been more present to use data analytics advantageously and to establish systems that allow an organization to smoothly integrate and leverage the power of data technology for the future.

Improving profitability along the entire vertical spectrum

After all, data analytic tools can help healthcare organizations all along the vertical spectrum, including financial, clinical, R&D, administrative, and operational applications.

But, there are also quite a few challenges to overcome. For one, many stakeholders in the healthcare industry are not sophisticated users of data and analytics. Some of the organizations still lack the necessary infrastructure to establish an enterprise-wide data analytics system. And health care data is also saddled with very specific rules regarding privacy, adding an additional layer of controls and filters to manage and process. Together, these factors can make the healthcare arena a very difficult sector to tackle from a data analytics perspective.

Intuitive and sophisticated performance analytics

In response to the specific needs and demands of the healthcare industry, ClicData, Inc. and FTI Consulting have developed an integrated cloud-based analytics platform, HealthCare Performance Analytics (HPA). HPA is a data analytics solution that combines a front end of user-friendly data visualization tools on top of sophisticated optimization models that put greater insights and controls of productivity and profitability in the hands of healthcare organization executives. HPA provides predictive models and analyses through actionable insights about healthcare patients, products, and partners. With data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning, the advanced data analytics solution delivers powerful business forecasts that enable organizational leaders to identify potential risks and opportunities when it matters most. The platform currently has three key modules:

Perioperative Analytics — A software solution that delivers case volume data from an organization’s core systems to those that need it using intuitive dashboards, scorecards and informative performance reporting tools.

Labor Analytics — An interactive tool that lets users model, measure, and manage their organizations’ labor and productivity metrics. Sustainable labor cost improvements can be achieved through continual performance monitoring, using proven metrics and tools, customized for each departments’ operating parameters and goals.

Provider Analytics —An interactive, cloud-based solution that lets users analyze, measure and manage physician productivity, patient access, and enterprise financial performance. The module is populated with monthly general ledger, payroll and selected practice management and ambulatory scheduling data from an organization’s core systems.

As the industry becomes more complex, and as massive quantities of data rush in from more and more sources, enterprise operations needs to be more efficient and more capable of analyzing that data than ever. Sophisticated data analytics solutions have never been more crucial to the success of healthcare organizations to keep the business on target with its objectives while providing targeted, actionable insights on demand at almost every level.

Dashboards designed for healthcare organizations provide a cost-effective solution for leveraging the power of the data that has become both prolific and readily available. Up and down the vertical spectrum of the organization, from operational efficiency to risk management, to quality of patient care, dashboards can help improve almost every aspect of your healthcare operations. See ClicData’s dashboards for healthcare.