In his article, Healthcare’s Radar Picks up Increased Business Intelligence Activity, Eric Wicklund makes some good points and ponders the best way to use business intelligence to improve healthcare.
Some background: 75% of payers and 44% providers find value in analytics, yet only 26% have BI programs in use. This shows a tremendous market for BI vendors and enormous potential for the payers and providers who are still on the fence. The big challenges are threefold. First, too many in healthcare do not yet understand the concepts of BI. Second, collecting good data requires more work in an industry that is already stretched thin. Third, once the data is collected and actionable, healthcare people need to use this data all the time to improve their process. In past blogs, I’ve talked about the BI Maturity Level and how to get better data. Today I want to talk about making data more social.
Many industries use scorecards and charts every day to track progress and monitor symptoms. In fact, healthcare professionals do this all the time when they use an EKG device at the bedside. Whenever a patient’s vitals get above or below the normal range, alarms start to ring and people react stat. BI enables similar tracking and action for business drivers. For example, if you are responsible for customer satisfaction at a physician practice, watching a graphical representation showing the number of patients in the waiting room, the average wait time, the maximum wait time, and a count of the complaints would enable you to take steps to move these patients through the clinic much faster. The systems to collect this information are already getting installed to support Meaningful Use. The key is using the data in a more real-time mode to influence behavior.
Another scenario is population health. A clinic could query their existing data, find a list of patients who are currently or are symptomatic for chronic diseases. Once these cohorts are identified, they can start a program to proactively reach out to these patients, invite them in for a checkup, provide training and counseling and lower the incidents of these diseases. It starts with the data and, more importantly, the willingness to change the current status quo and practice proactive rather than reactive medicine.
Healthcare reform driven by the government will prime the pump. It is up to the industry to keep pumping.
Download our new whitepaper, “Business Intelligence Primer for Healthcare Professionals” to learn more about this topic. Also, join me for the webinar “Healthcare Business Intelligence for Power Users” on September 13th at 12pm CDT.
