How Business Intelligence is Shaping the Healthcare
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How Business Intelligence is Shaping the Healthcare

CIO Review

The healthcare industry is on the verge of transformation. According to 2015 KLAS BI perception report, in the near future more than half of the healthcare organizations are strategizing to swap or purchase a brand new Business Intelligence (BI) system.

BI prevails to be one of the fastest growing areas in the world of healthcare. The technology-driven process assists in analyzing the data collected from various sources and deliver actionable insights to help corporate executives, business managers and other stakeholders to take better business decisions. The BI uptake across organization is rising, and offering new dimensions of BI tools that either provides profound insights or deeper penetration within organization’s workflow.

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The healthcare business intelligence market is steered by the increasing amount of healthcare data stored with lower prices and availability of vast patient data creating an extraordinary opportunity for healthcare organizations. This keeps healthcare executives and CIOs on their toes to seek better ways to harness data.

What compels healthcare industries to turn towards BI?

Today, healthcare providers are investing their trust in business intelligence analytics to improve quality of care, boost financial and operational success, and automate regulatory requirements.

Healthcare technology is famous for hoarding big data, as data pass-on from various sources such as electronic health records, doctor reports, insurance claims, phone calls and more—all of which are growing exponentially. First step in the process of hoarding is to accumulate information, which is simpler as compared to making sensible data or pulling out valuable insights from the data. As the data grows, the daunting complexity in handling them enforces organizations to incline towards BI tools to assist them in consolidating, visualizing, and analyzing the data.

What are the three biggest BI and analytics trends for healthcare in the year 2016?

Firstly, advanced analytics now comes with automated data discovery and visualization functionality that enhances knowledge of workers like clinicians, physicians, nurses and business analysts. It is highly-important for an employee to gain experience and exposure on functionality across organization. The second trend is about the removal of rough patch between the governance and the self service analytics. Finally, most of the healthcare providers are embracing Center of Excellence (CoE) approach. While it is important to give prominence to analytics, many organizations are taking it to the next level and establishing Centers of Excellence (CoE) to foster adoption.

What are the challenges faced by BI systems?

Most of the data that gets accumulated in healthcare industry are not stored in the digital form. This makes it hard to collect the data, construct data warehouse, and load data into a rule-based engine in order to access actionable information and also to generate reports and ad-hoc analysis.

From the analyzed report, healthcare professionals can identify the areas to be focused on, and it helps them while taking actions against the focused areas by determining the order, time and manner of execution that they are supposed to take.

In addition to the efficient way of using the data generated by the BI tool, there are other challenges like how healthcare organization staff handles the information systems.

How does BI assist healthcare industry?

The graph related to the adoption of business intelligence in healthcare industry is yet to reach its point of inflection. Despite the current economic scenario, investment in this technology has proved worth in the health IT market, representing BI as one of the fastest-growing software segments. BI offers a structure that enables organizations to monitor fiscal performance and operational standards while providing decision maker a landscape of the future.

Financial Data Analysis

The BI tool assists healthcare organizations to take a better financial decision via budget management, tracking inventory and supply costs. It also keeps an eye on key metrics, revenue, and rate the performance at all levels. In addition, the tool spots the key performance indicators and learns financial goals like return on net assets or profitability. The reports generated by the tool are simple and straightforward, which is displayed on the dashboard.

Clinical Analytics

Clinical analytics measures the quality of the data retrieved from the lab test results, patient’s safety and the rate of unfulfilled prescriptions to the average wait time in the emergency room.

These insights can be leveraged to make appropriate decisions at the operation level in numerous ways. Moreover, it assists nurses to prioritize their care activities during working hours and public health officials to identify Medically Underserved Areas.

Two insights retrieved from clinical analytics are retrospective and prospective analytics. Retrospective analytics includes performance measurement systems that collect and inspect organizational data to improve the health of a patient or enhance the performance of the organization. Prospective analytics displays the necessary insights for future planning and care, and generally analyze individual patient information.

Real-Time Analysis

Analytics works similar to a human brain, with additional ability to monitor the effectiveness and quality of physician care. BI offers real-time analysis of the health and treatment plans prescribed by physicians. This gives administrators of healthcare organizations the ability to ensure that doctors are adhering to best practices, evidence-based standards, and other quality metrics. The insights gleaned from these tools can also help executives to better understand Accountable Care Organization (ACO) activities, especially as new ACOs and reimbursement change emerge under healthcare reform.

What kind of data do they store, and what do they retrieve from it?

With the help of BI, healthcare organizations overcome the challenge to create a single repository of information. Sharing one platform to store data will be the key for organizations. By integrating multiple datasets, healthcare organizations maintain the consistency of crucial assets like master patient indexes, physician masters, and diagnosis and procedure codes. The data in the healthcare industry can also be leveraged for service line profitability, claims management, and surgical analytics. By using the well-organized historical data, not only they enhance the quality of the care but also reduce the operational cost.

The Keystone Health Center in Michigan made use of data to address a mounting epidemic of adverse events, such as patient falls, accidents, or other negative turns in health. BI tools assisted Keystone Center in gathering obstetrics data from 60 Michigan hospitals, and also helped in examining the information for warning signs, common indicators, and other trends.

Implementation

The implementation of BI in healthcare offers maximum utilization of diverse clinical data, reimbursement scenarios and patient information which in turn improves the clinical result and patient health. Business intelligence systems used by hospitals provides a joined structure for medical data assessment, data sharing and collation.

Use Cases

Implementing business intelligence tools accredited University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) to streamline the data and convert liability into an advantage. UPMC is a healthcare enterprise that manages 22 hospitals and 400 outpatient sites, wherein it deals with a massive amount of data.

Couple of their membership organizations was successful in leveraging the software to foresee the impact of flu season on patients. They were also able to decide which patients required more services from their facilities and which ones are certain to require emergency care, and forecast readmission rates. BI tools were beneficial in predicting patient needs which lead to the improvement in the efficiency of the care. BI tools not only offered better service, but assisted UPMC hospitals save money from regulatory fines by reducing the number of readmissions. Business Intelligence tool has proved its worth in predicting patient needs, generating efficiency report via data mining to treat diseases, and reduces the unfavorable events.

Conclusion

In the healthcare industry, it’s essential to have the access to precise information at the right time. Businesses may be flooded with data, but many organizations are now getting familiar with the brand new responsibility of leveraging data to create more value, whether it is to cut down the cost, offer better customer support, drive additional sales, or improve process efficiency. And healthcare organizations are one of them as they are accelerating towards analytics to improve decision makings and their abilities to serve the human kind.

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