Healthcare organizations are dealing with issues such as reducing costs and bolstering productivity when they intend to enhance patient care. Over the past few years the way healthcare has been delivered by providers has been changing drastically to enhance patient-provider relationships. Increasing access to social media and mobile technologies has also changed the way patients receive healthcare from providers.
Why must you transform your healthcare enterprise to become data driven?
Let’s go over how health care was provided in the past – when you get sick, you visit the doctor and he/she prescribes medication and you use the medicine for a few days. It’s okay if you recover, otherwise you visit the doctor again and another medicine is prescribed and used. Look at the suffering you go through and how lousy and uncomfortable the process is.
Now, with data analytics your doctor can provide you with personalized treatment with an analysis of your health history and other mitigating factors. You receive the right treatment at the earliest possibility without the lousy procedures.
To deliver personalized healthcare, organizations in the U.S. are transforming themselves to become data-driven with data analytics. It is a patient centric and value-based approach that delivers enhanced healthcare. Organizations must know the value of their data and consider it an asset to make their services more patient-centric. Healthcare providers must become data driven to survive in the industry.
Data analytics in healthcare
Big Data is defined as “large volumes of high velocity, variety and veracity data” and it requires advanced technologies and tools to store, distribute, capture, manage, monitor, visualize and analyze the disparate structured and unstructured information. Veracity is a significant characteristic of data, especially for healthcare organizations, and data analytics encompasses it.
Healthcare enterprises generate large volumes of high velocity, variety and veracity data every day. This data (also known as ‘big data’) is processed in a wide range of medical and healthcare functions. Data analytics enables organizations to analyze the data in search of unexploited opportunities to improve their business opportunities.
In the healthcare industry, the significance of data analytics relies on analyzing large volumes of variable data that increases with high velocity while extracting the required information. This would help an enterprise or a doctor during the decision making process and deliver the patient-centric and valued care.
How do healthcare organizations benefit from data analytics?
Healthcare organizations can make significant strides towards for quality and operational improvements by transforming the enterprise to data-driven with data analytics. In the medical industry, data analytics can guide organizations towards data-driven transformation and achieve patient care goals.
There are three types of data analytics – descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.
Descriptive analytics:
It is the first step to transform data analytics into actionable insights. Descriptive analytics enables healthcare providers to pull out human-readable reports that highlight what has happened over the past few months. With these reports, providers can analyze the number of patients admitted for that specific time period and the number of patients returned within 30 days after they are discharged along with other important details.
As per the readmissions program created under the Affordable Care Act, hospitals will face penalties when patients return within 30 days of discharge. With descriptive analytics, hospitals can analyze the reasons for readmission and improve their healthcare practices to avoid the penalty.
Predictive analytics:
Predictive analytics gives healthcare organizations the ability to use descriptive data to speculate what can happen in the future. Predictive analytics is now a buzz in the medical and healthcare industry as it enables organizations to cut down on unnecessary expenses and avoid penalties with the ability to predict what will happen. It requires a more robust infrastructure than electronic health records as it supports advanced decision making for significant enterprise progress.
Prescriptive analytics:
With prescriptive analytics, an organization can improve their healthcare and clinical care delivered to patients by finding the best action for a situation that is predicted. Prescriptive analytics is the future of healthcare analytics because it allows organizations to understand future opportunities and seize them, while at the same time mitigating future risks.
Sudhakar Goverdhanam
CEO Prime Technology Group LLC
Prime Directives 