Leveraging the Power of Data

With global concerns about containing the cost of healthcare, most countries and organisations are working towards leveraging technology in order to improve efficiencies. They are required to streamline operations, maximise profits and at the same time, deliver superior healthcare benefits to patients. It’s clear that healthcare organisations that can adapt promptly and strategically to changing dynamics and ever-increasing challenges will be better prepared to succeed in the long-run. Ironically, the solution to most of these challenges are trapped within a mountain of patient and organisational data that’s buried deep within a multitude of clinical and administrative systems — that are neither integrated nor fully utilised. Hence, it is sacrosanct to leverage health analytics and derive trusted insights from data.

Identifying challenges and developing analytical capabilities

In the face of ever-rising healthcare costs and unforeseen complexities, healthcare providers need to leverage their operational and clinical data in order to facilitate a culture of data-driven decision making. From increasing patient safety, to improving the management and quality of care, and becoming more financially stable through efficiency and cost management, the use of advanced analytics is critical. It must also be noted that typically in the healthcare industry, data comes from different sources and making it available to the front-end business users is often a challenge.

While it is important for users in the healthcare industry to observe transactional, clinical and customer data, it is even more important to leverage data in its entirety and not in mere subsets. This complexity requires organisations to create integrated data sources in order to ensure that while deriving insights, useful nuggets of information are not missed out. In addition to transforming data into intelligence, it’s also necessary to ensure that insights are made available to users across the organisation and in formats that are easy to interpret – via web-based portal, mobile, email or any other channel/format. Health analytics encompasses the technologies and skills used to deliver business, clinical and programmatic insights into the complex interdependencies that drive medical outcomes, costs and oversight. Use of analytics can help healthcare organisations in three broad ways:

• Measure, track and enhance performance more effectively and efficiently
• Improve health outcomes and patient safety by delivering evidence-based developments in quality of care
• Save on costs through accurate forecasting and real-time access to information

Moving from a reactive approach to a proactive methodology

Using analytics and/ or business intelligence as a tool, doesn’t imply that an organisation is using analytics to its full capacity. The Indian and global healthcare industry is largely preoccupied with descriptive statistics. This helps organisations answer ‘what’, but offer no insights into ‘why’ or ‘how’. This is the typical hindsight, insight and foresight scenario. While hindsight and insight are important in determining the root-cause and description of a problem, foresight is required to answer how things can be done in a better way in the future. Moving from a reactive approach to a proactive methodology is an intelligent way of leveraging insights in decision-making process. Inculcating analytics in the day-to-day culture can help healthcare providers in reducing costs, detecting frauds, driving efficiency and enhancing patient benefits. For instance, The Aarogyasri Health Care Trust (an initiative by the government of Andhra Pradesh) leverages the power of forward-looking predictive analytics to lower health expenses in the state, so more patients and diseases can be treated. The Aarogyasri Health Care Trust relies on SAS analytics to measure performance and keep expenses down. Claims, financial and clinical data are used in forecasts that ultimately root out fraud, spot disease trends, and lead to preventive health measures.

Advanced analytics must be fully utilised to drive improvement in patient outcomes and gain in-depth insights into clinical performance. Through modelling, optimisation, predictive analytics and business intelligence, organisations can gain insights to enhance financial and budgetary performance, deepen consumer-centric relationships and improve the way healthcare is delivered for superior outcomes across the entire spectrum of health industries. With latest technologies such as In-Memory Analytics and Data Visualisation, healthcare organisations can resolve complex problems in near real-time, derive accurate insights, leverage data in its entirety and generate easy-to-understand reports that can be accessed by users across the organisation via mobile devices. SAS has in-depth domain knowledge and unmatched experience of delivering health analytics to the healthcare industry for fraud detection and prevention, health and condition management for improved outcomes, actuarial analysis for improved financial performance and new data-based methods for customer retention.

Informed decisions for improved outcomes

Progressive healthcare organisations are leveraging advanced analytics to data and deriving sophisticated predictions that have the potential to improve healthcare services and business outcomes. The utilisation of such technology has the potential to benefit patients and their families. However, that’s not all. Using predictive analytics to reduce re-admissions can have an impact on a healthcare organisation’s bottomline, as providers in many countries are now facing monetary consequences from payers that have tied financial penalties directly to unwarranted patient readmissions. With advanced analytics, healthcare organisations can gauge what interventions are working and then fine tune them in real-time for certain segments of patients. For instance, the analysis could drill down to evaluate what works for say young patients who are suffering from a certain disease, are members of a specific socio-economic group, and live in a certain region. Instant and easy access to such forward-looking insights can be helpful to users across the organisation in not only treating the patients well but also in increasing efficiency.

A vital aspect that must be factored before commencing the analytics journey in healthcare is understanding the pain-points that need to be addressed before selecting the technology. Most healthcare organisations land-up doing it the other way round, where they focus on the technology first. Healthcare as an industry is vastly diversified – they could differ based on speciality, geography, scale of operations, etc. It is therefore important to understand the business challenges and the magnitude of each challenge, before starting-off with an analytics initiative. Analytics, especially in the healthcare industry, is not merely a project. It is the confluence of people, processes and culture; which finally helps in benefitting the patients and their families in the best possible way.

To summarise, there has never been a greater need to derive trusted, forward-looking insights from data, and the use of health analytics is critical. Creating a solid analytics foundation is imperative for the healthcare industry which is facing unprecedented transformation. Healthcare organisations must utilise operational and clinical data from multiple disparate sources and empower their users to quickly and easily derive intelligent insights from these massive chunks of data. A culture of data-driven decision making can help healthcare organisations to better utilise their resources, eliminate gut-feel and hunches, comply with regulators, streamline processes and above all – deliver superior healthcare benefits to patients.