Healthcare organizations sit on top of a mountain of available patient data records. Of course, this raw data is useless on its own but, when analyzed properly, it can be turned into actionable information that can help better diagnose and manage illness, research new treatments, and even prevent disease.
In today’s ever-changing world, leading providers are adopting an intelligent analytics strategy, including a combination of information technology, business intelligence tools, and highly-technical talent to make sense of it all. At HealthTECH Resources, Inc., we are constantly working with healthcare organizations to help them build an analytics infrastructure that is customized to the unique needs of their patients and their businesses. As such, we spend a considerable amount of time tracking analytics trends and use cases to inform our own strategy. Here is a couple that stands out as driving the future for healthcare analytics:
Analytics Center of Excellence (COE) at the Cleveland Clinic
The Cleveland Clinic is one of the nation’s top care providers, so it is no surprise that it is also leading the charge in the application of analytics to improve patient outcomes. The COE developed a patient risk identification solution with self-service visual analytics to help clinicians and care coordinators better understand patient data in real-time. Andy Dé, a thought leader in the healthcare tech space, wrote about the success of the program. “Leveraging their visual analytics platform in lieu of their legacy BI and Analytics platforms enabled them to embrace an ‘Agile Analytics’ paradigm and lower time to value with their analytics solution by over 50%.”
Beth Israel Deaconess Care Organization (BIDCO)
Beth Israel’s care organization has leaned into the trend of value-based care, putting a greater emphasis on patient outcomes, fewer medical errors, and lower readmission rates instead of focusing on how many tests and procedures they can deliver. As a result, they are using analytics to help gain a clearer picture of their patient’s health in order to deliver better overall care. Jessica Davis, an editor for InformationWeek, outlines how BIDCO is using preventative metrics to incentivize value-based care. “One metric might be, what percentage of eligible patients in the overall patient population completed their mammogram screening tests this year? Another is, what percentage of diabetic patients completed their A1C test this year? The higher the percentage, the greater the share of surplus dollars that BIDCO network members get to share. In this way, the practices are incentivized to close the gaps in care.”
In the Harvard Business Review, Sanjeev Agrawal of LeanTaaS argues that hospitals need better data science. “Airlines are arguably more operationally complex, asset-intensive, and regulated than hospitals, yet the best performers are doing a better job by far than most hospitals at keeping costs low and making a decent profit while delivering what their customers expect,” he notes. We believe that, as value-based care and other trends reward healthcare providers that wrangle their data and develop stronger analytics capacity, we will see continued investment in technology and talent to help build better businesses and healthier patient populations.
Here’s more information about the importance of data in real-world healthcare settings.
Types of Data Analytics in Healthcare
Big data can be analyzed in multiple ways. For example, descriptive analytics allows healthcare professionals to spot benchmarks and patterns in the data. Prescriptive analytics, meanwhile, uses machine learning to help professionals make informed decisions while predictive analytics will estimate what’s likely to happen in the future. Discovery analytics also relies on machine learning to decipher actions to take.
Benefits of Healthcare Data Analytics in Healthcare
Thanks to this large volume of data (“big data”), the healthcare industry can analyze plenty of it to glean important insights. Analytics Insight is anticipating a growth of 36 percent of big data—the volume of anonymous patient data gathered—through 2025. EHR systems can be the largest aggregator of healthcare data; its adoption has doubled in physician’s offices since 2008, which creates even more data to be analyzed.
Data analytics can allow trends to surface that can guide medical professionals and help facilities to create processes that will help to reduce medical errors. When errors are lessened, best practices information in the EHR systems can allow healthcare teams to develop treatment plans that can improve patient experiences and health outcomes. This same information can help to create preventative health plans.
Big data can also be used to analyze the success of treatments for conditions, improving what patients in the future will receive. Again, this allows for more informed and potentially more successful treatments. Better treatments can reduce the number of emergency or urgent care visits besides improved health outcomes overall.
The more efficiently healthcare organizations can address patient issues, the more streamlined they can become. This can save time and reduce costs.
Using big data and data analytics in your EHR can allow medical professionals to have access to the same real-time patient information, including when a person’s condition changes. Data can even be strategically analyzed to spot fraud, serving to protect a healthcare organization’s financial situation.
Healthcare Data Analytics: Today and in the Near Future
Using Epic as an example, since it’s the most widely used EHR system today, forward-thinking EHR systems continue to incorporate big data into its modules. Epic Cheers, for example, debuted in March 2022 to help consumers find medical care using streamlined intake processes. Healthcare organizations, meanwhile, will glean deep insights into their patient populations through the tens of thousands of data points incorporated into the module. These can be used to proactively prepare for patients and the needs they’ll have while guiding professionals who are currently caring for patients.
Soon, healthcare facilities can also benefit from the implementation of Epic Best Care of My Patient. Scheduled to debut in 2023, data is leveraged to help physicians and other healthcare providers to identify best practices for patient care. Big data used in this module comes from Cosmos, which contains data from more than 135 million anonymous patient records. This big data provides the information that healthcare providers will need to make even better, more informed decisions about a particular patient.
With Epic Best Care for My Patient, big data is easily searchable to find precisely what a medical professional needs. To further enhance the module, Epic is working closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to use data that is clear and representative of the population in the United States.
Heart of Healthcare Data Analytics
At the core of data analytics, not surprisingly, is clean, accurate data points. So, when your healthcare organization decides to upgrade to a new electronic health records system, it’s crucial to use EMR data migration best practices. It isn’t unusual to need EMR consultants who specialize in this to fill in staffing gaps of your in-house IT team. This is where HealthTECH Resources can play a key role, helping to augment your staff in key ways for EMR migration purposes as well as the overall implementation of the application.
We can provide the EMR consulting professionals you need for top systems such as these:
Professionals from our well-vetted, deep, and wide network can help whether you’re migrating from paper records to an EHR system or from an EMR to an EHR. Our experts focus on the integrity of your information using EMR data migration best practices coupled with your facility’s unique needs. This involves assessing your current application and your new one, migrating the appropriate data; some will be dedupe while other pieces will be archived. Whatever you need, our EMR consultants will collaborate and work alongside your in-house team, communicating clearly and well.
Healthcare Data Security
Protecting your data through appropriate security measures is also crucial in today’s world—and the EHR data migration experts in our network can also help with security. They can help your facilities to create and/or implement an information security plan: an InfoSec plan or ISP for short. This can involve how you encrypt your data, protect your network, and much more.
The goal is for a system that protects confidential patient and financial data with integrity. Data should be protected against damage, additions, deletions, or other alterations while still allowing for ease of access to professionals who have a right to see this data.
Choose HealthTECH Resources for Your EMR Consultants
Contact us when you need assistance with your secure EMR migration. You’ll likely discover that many layers of complexity exist within your project with excellent EHR data migration ensuring the cleanliness and integrity of your data going forward, allowing your organization to contribute to big data collected to glean crucial insights.
Our experienced boutique-style agency can help you to analyze your in-house IT team to see where bandwidth issues exist or specialized knowledge is required. We provide accelerated solutions with experts available as EMR consultants, contract to hire professionals, and permanent placements. To get started with staff augmentation, please contact us online today or call us at (602) 903-7961.
PRESIDENT/CEO AT HEALTHTECH RESOURCES
Larry has specialized in building strategic healthcare relationships for over 25 years, helping the nation’s top payors and providers solve some of their most pressing business challenges through an intelligent mix of staffing services, training, and consulting.