Healthcare Analytics: Why Every Hospital Should Use it?

Hospitals use a lot of technology today. And, every digital equipment or an app is generating lots of data. However, the data is just piles of ‘zeros’ and ‘ones’ unless you try to process it and extract actionable intelligence and insights from it. Yes, data without analytics is nothing.

A survey conducted by Health Catalyst highlights that 90% of the respondents are of the opinion that healthcare analytics is going to be either “extremely important” or “very important” to their organization within the next few years. Healthcare analytics is poised to transform the health care industry and help it address critical challenges like improved patient outcomes, quality of care, lower treatment costs and more.

Healthcare Analytics Benefits and Why Hospitals should consider using it?

Healthcare analytics is the collection, processing and analysis of data to identify patterns and insights into patient engagement, diagnosis, clinical practices etc. It combines historical and real-time data to derive insights from it. These trends or insights can then be visualized on a dashboard for easier and faster understanding.

Healthcare analytics is gaining a lot of attention in the healthcare industry as it offers numerous benefits including

• Improved operational efficiency- Healthcare Analytics can help hospitals in measuring admission rates, bed occupancy, asset utilization and staff productivity. Historical and real-time data can be harnessed to identify trends of peaks and troughs and hospitals can accordingly manage their resources. For example, healthcare analytics can help you predict hospital admissions with high accuracy which can help hospitals manage their staff.
• Improving treatment outcomes- Healthcare analytics can deliver you actionable intelligence by processing vast amounts of data to help your physicians accurately diagnose and treat patients. Today, data science technologies can help radiologists with medical image processing allowing them to do more in less time. Digital assistants can be used to complement analytics so as to help in early-level diagnosis.
• Precision Medicine- In a world of customizations, how can care be left behind. Today, hospitals have the power of analytics that can process millions of records to give you insights on what medicines or treatment will be effective on a specific individual.
• Fraud prevention- As per the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, every year, the US healthcare system losses billions of dollars in frauds. Healthcare analytics can help hospitals analyze billing data and patient records to detect anomalies like duplicate claims, abnormal admissions etc., to minimize frauds.
• Increased Patient Satisfaction- What does a patient want? Good care at affordable costs. Healthcare analytics can help hospitals in driving patient satisfaction by helping improve process efficiency, and reducing re-admissions through better care. This will lover the treatment costs for patients.

The applications of healthcare analytics are enormous. Today we have access to a huge amount of data and, moreover, have access to powerful technologies like AI, Machine Learning and Deep learning etc., that can help us process millions of patient records, medical images, billing data and claim records etc., to deliver useful insights. These insights and intelligence can help hospitals to take their services to the next level, explore new care models and innovate practices.

At AppShark, we have worked with many leading healthcare organizations helping them solve their problems and restructuring their processes. If you are interested in building advanced healthcare analytics for your organization or are looking for data-driven solutions, please connect with us at sales@appshark.com and we’ll schedule a call with one of our experts at the earliest.