Healthcare is more than just a want; it’s something everyone needs at some point in their lives. Despite being so essential, there are, like every other industry, inefficiencies in the delivery of healthcare. Over 25 percent of hospitals lost money in 2016. While the industry is profitable as a whole, there’s clearly room for improvement.
With that in mind, here are some ideas for optimizing your healthcare data analytics.
Evaluate the Needs of Your Organization
You’re going to waste time and resources if you get ahead of yourself in the conceptualization phase of building an analytics protocol. There are lots of options out there for how your organization can collect and analyze data.
Not nearly all of them, however, is going to be a good choice in all scenarios. This is particularly true in a sector like healthcare, which requires more concern than most due to data privacy issues.
Research firm McKinsey makes some important observations about the process of organizations moving into their next generation of data analytics. They note many organizations without a clear strategic focus and employee onboarding from the outset end up wandering and their projects become more like isolated experiments than implementation.
Furthermore, they say, “These companies quickly become frustrated when they see their efforts falling short while more analytically driven companies are leveraging their data.
The democratization of data is blurring sector boundaries; businesses will increasingly find themselves disrupted not by the company they have been monitoring for the last several years, but by a newcomer from another industry.”
If one thing is certain, others are using data to solve problems. Without a similar plan on your part, those organizations will start stealing pieces of what you thought was your pie.
Get the Tools and People to Keep You Ahead of the Game
Expertise is one of the most essential elements of good healthcare. No one wants to receive surgery from a data scientist. In the same way, enterprises need the correct people and tools to be successful with analytics. This will be much easier to accomplish when you’ve determined the focus and needs of the organization.
Once you know what needs to happen in order to derive value from your analytics, it’s time to start thinking about how to put this plan together. One of the biggest choices will be the work and resources to keep in-house, versus working with third-party companies. A great example is provided by the Tec5USA spectrometers company. They use their massive databases in order to extract value from them and use it to optimize the production of spectrometers.
There are compelling arguments on both sides of healthcare analytics.
While saving money is an important function for all enterprises, in the world of data, cutting corners can come with a cost. Allowing competitors to have inherent advantages can lead to significant loss of market share.
These issues are even more severe for healthcare companies as the quality of their data analytics can literally be the difference between life and death.
Platform providers such as ThoughtSpot give companies the right tools for finding deeper insights from data, faster. Thanks to search analytics, even employees without extensive training in data can get quick, accurate insights.
This has the potential to change how organizations operate from the ground up.
Democratize Data While Meeting Regulatory Guidelines
While the democratization of data through search analytics and other features is beneficial in many ways, it can also have drawbacks. Data can be very sensitive. Risk of data loss is one of the major reasons enterprises have been traditionally skeptical about democratization of data.
This is especially true in the healthcare industry, which has extra stringent regulations and guidelines when it comes to protecting patients.
Working with external organizations, however, can be helpful in this regard. Many analytics companies will be intimately familiar with regulatory risks and hurdles due to having worked with other industry players. While you’ll always want to double-check for compliance, having that expertise in your corner can make the on-boarding process faster and less likely to trigger legal troubles down the line.
Take the Time to Build Effective Dashboards
Dashboards shouldn’t be an afterthought. They’re often the first place relevant stakeholders will go to check on key performance metrics. Due to this, it’s essential to take the time to make these dashboards contain relevant information customized to each individual user.
People working in different parts of the organization don’t need to see the same things. Refining dashboards as much as possible will save time for everyone in the long term.
Healthcare is an industry ripe for improvement. An industry dependent upon so many data points is an ideal candidate for change through analytics.