Americans spend more on healthcare than the citizens of any other industrialized country, whether it’s measured in total spending, per capita spending, or as a percentage of GDP. And the rate of growth is similarly remarkable. By 2016, healthcare spending in the U.S. is expected to double from 2 to 4 trillion dollars which equates to over $12,600 for every man, woman, and child in the country and a whopping 20% of gross domestic product.
For many provider organizations it would be tempting to look at this projection and see business opportunity. And while a growing market certainly can create opportunities, it is also a cause of great concern for healthcare executives who know that this runaway spending cannot continue unchecked forever. Insurance carriers, patients and employers are demanding greater accountability and demonstration of value for their healthcare dollar, and these demands will only intensify in the future.
The Perficient IBM National Business Unit is working directly with our partner IBM and their Healthcare Industry subject matter experts to meet the challenges providers are facing as the industry by helping them to establish a culture of performance management; that is, an ongoing process by which organizations define their strategic direction and then deploy their business processes and management systems in support of that direction. This requires establishing performance expectations through the planning and budgeting process, and then continually monitoring performance against the plan, making adjustments as necessary.
This process requires not only sophisticated tools and infrastructure but a strong commitment on the part of leaders to develop a performance-oriented culture. This is a special challenge for healthcare organizations that typically have a high degree of organizational complexity, diffuse lines of authority and accountability, and a culture of mission and community service that often is at odds with management discipline and rigor.
The Future of Big Data
With some guidance, you can craft a data platform that is right for your organization’s needs and gets the most return from your data capital.
One specific area where Perficient’s IBM National Business Unit is helping Healthcare organizations is with the management of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and reporting. Providers often face challenges meeting mandated reporting requirements such as:
- A comprehensive platform to collect and analyze these measures
- Capital or skills to acquire decision support and analytics capabilities
- Fragmented information across systems that lack appropriate data quality
- Dependency on manual, labor-intensive processes to pull reports in a timely manner
- Limited visibility to information and processes to manage performance across functional boundaries
The Perficient Health Analytics QuickStart is solution built-on industry approved and tested IBM Analytics platform. The seamless integration and testing across solution layers simplifies deployment and delivers results faster. The pricing simplifies licensing and project approvals. The included implementation services, free Healthcare organizations to focus on a well-defined goals – not IT issues. Customers can see real results in less than six months. The Health Analytics Quick Start is a proven, complete analytics solution that delivers fast time to value and provides a robust foundation for implementing broader analytics in the future.
The powerful capabilities of InfoSphere DataStage and IBM Cognos 10 offer a resilient, secure platform for healthcare applications. With IBM PureData System for Analytics and the healthcare provider data warehouse, you will have two components of the IBM big data platform. From there you can easily add big data capabilities to capture and analyze valuable unstructured and streaming data to further enrich your analytics initiatives.
The Health Analytics Quick Start solution is built around key solution deliverables to quickly get you up and running:
- Dashboards: Track clinical care measures and gaps in care across populations, track and benchmark performance across the organization.
- IBM Cognos 10: Business intelligence report authoring and a browser-based report viewer.
- PureData System for Analytics: A comprehensive data warehouse platform that offers simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimization, no tuning and minimal ongoing maintenance.
- Perficient Healthcare Provider Data Model: Logical data models and business solution templates that help healthcare providers build and deploy reliable, accurate health analytics.
- IBM InfoSphere DataStage: A powerful ETL tool that supports the collection, integration and transformation of large volumes of data, with data structures ranging from simple to highly complex.
- AIX Solution Edition for Cognos: An IBM Power 740 server is optimized to deliver superior performance for IBM Cognos, reduce risk and deliver high quality of service.
Perficient provides healthcare organizations with the tools, techniques, and advice they need to develop a culture of performance management. Watch this short video below and learn more about the work the Peficient IBM National Business Unit is doing in Healthcare with IBM and see a demo of our Healthcare Analytics QuickStart.