For years, hospitals have generated large amounts of data, such as patient records, prescription fulfillment, insurance claims and admission statistics. However, only recently have tools become available to derive valuable insights from this data. As a result, stakeholders in the healthcare industry are now using analytics to optimize patient care and improve marketing efforts, driving a digital transformation in this sector. NexGen Surgical offers a suite of advanced healthcare analytics tools that give surgeons and their staff greater control over their practice.
What Is Healthcare Data Analytics?
Healthcare analytics use data to improve clinical care, typically without excessive spending. This data primarily comes from the following four areas:
- Claims and cost data
- Clinical data
- Patient behavior data
- Pharmaceutical data
Common areas of focus for healthcare analytics include the following:
- Clinical practice
- Finances
- Fraud
- HR
- Marketing
- Supply chain
How Does Healthcare Analytics Improve Patient Care?
Healthcare analytics can deliver better patient services and improve patient outcomes. It typically accomplishes this by combining the analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) and external data sources like clinical trials and disease registries. Specific benefits of analytics include identifying at-risk patients, improving diagnosis and treatment and identifying disease clusters.
Analytics can identify patients at risk of chronic diseases by reviewing EHRs for information on reported symptoms, medication, medical visits and hospitalizations. Analysis of this data can provide insights into the patient’s risk factors and overall health.
With analytics, physicians can make personalized medical decisions by improving the diagnosis and treatment of health conditions. For example, this process can use data from multiple patients with a particular condition to determine which medication works best.
Analytics can help identify disease clusters by using statistics and machine learning (ML) algorithms to develop a predictive model. This use of healthcare analytics improves the management of communicable diseases, especially in their early stage.
Benefits of Healthcare Data Analytics
The benefits of healthcare data analytics may be classified into the following:
- Improve medical research
- Improve health outcomes
- Gain operational insights
- Improve staffing
Improve Medical Research
Medical research generates large amounts of data that must be effectively managed and analyzed to be useful. Overcoming the challenges of big data requires high-end computing solutions, including analytics. As a result, integrating big data with analytics is revolutionizing the development of medical therapies.
Improve Health Outcomes
Improving health outcomes aims to treat patients more effectively while minimizing the trauma caused by the treatment. Analytics accomplishes this by collecting and analyzing patient data, typically in real time. This capability provides a better understanding of the patient’s condition and helps develop a systematic approach to treatment based on continuous development, testing and implementation.
Gain Operational Insights
Measuring the effects of operational changes on efficiency requires healthcare providers to collect and analyze processes in a clinical setting. This process begins with an assessment of the current conditions throughout the hospital and the development of a strategy for improvement. The operational areas most benefit from analytics include administration, charting, employee scheduling and financial management.
Improve Staffing
Analytics can help identify problems with recruitment, hiring, training and retaining staff. This process requires healthcare providers to balance costs and the growing shortage of healthcare professionals. Analytics can help accomplish this goal by adopting a data-driven approach to staffing that replaces paper-based systems with digital systems. This transition provides administrators greater insight into individual worker productivity, allowing them to reduce staffing without compromising patient care. In addition, administrators can obtain this information in minutes rather than days or weeks.
How Can Healthcare Data Analytics Identify Growth Opportunities for Health Systems?
Best practices for identifying growth opportunities with healthcare analytics include creating a data governance strategy, prioritizing patient care and maintaining complete transparency. Robust data governance requires hospitals to expand their analytics capabilities into new areas like artificial intelligence and machine learning. They should also use them to improve clinical care by leveraging real-time patient data. Analytics can also improve transparency in physician reviews by using star ratings from patient surveys.
By closely analyzing the surgical needs of hospitals and rural communities, NexGen Surgical crafts customized plans that streamline surgical services and enhance patient care. In addition, by adopting innovative analytics capabilities, NexGen Surgical helps hospitals transform their surgical and ancillary services into efficient, collaborative profit centers.
Contact us online or call 844-592-0802 today to learn how we can make your surgical department more profitable with analytics.