The Definitive Guide to Embedded Analytics for Healthcare

Data & Healthcare: Ground Reality

The healthcare analytics industry is experiencing explosive global growth, projected to grow to $19B by 2027. Improving quality of care, operational efficiency and business expansion are typical concerns, but in the new business environment emerging from the pandemic, healthcare organizations also want to get a competitive advantage. Healthcare executives want to take advantage of the data related to finance and operational KPIs to identify areas of opportunity, but end users like clinicians typically lack the time and skills to decipher complicated dashboards. As a result, data stagnates in inflexible dashboards, leading to missed opportunities throughout the business.

With Sisense, topline healthcare organizations like Philips Healthcare, GE Health, Oscar Health and Innovaccer have completely integrated analytics insights into their everyday workflows to overcome the inadequacies of traditional BI and reduce their dependence on analyst reporting. This empowers every user to take action at the point of insight to improve patient and business outcomes.  

Challenges in Healthcare Analytics

Healthcare organizations have a wealth of data like patient medical records, pharmacy records, biomedical research and insurance records that are scattered in disparate sources. However they continue to face challenges in making sense of the data, getting a comprehensive picture of the business, extracting actionable insights and taking quick steps to remedy any failures to deliver on the promise of analytics. This is why analytics must become an integral, invisible part of daily workflows to inform every step of the decision-making process across the organization.

Sisense to the Rescue

Healthtech and SaaS providers can embed analytics within their core products to help their healthcare customers meet their immediate challenges and gain competitive advantage. For example, a hospital has many opportunities to use analytics to improve operations that directly impact revenue and patient care. Analytics insights and prescriptive recommendations can help clinicians take immediate actions on patient intake, physician scheduling and resource allocation to reduce wait times. 

Sisense in Action

An anomaly is detected – a hospital administrator views a dashboard and receives an in-workflow alert indicating an increase in patient wait times and associated operational costs within the cardiology department.

They are presented with a recommended action to assign more physicians to the affected hospital. Within the platform, they can view and schedule additional physicians based on their location and availability.

By taking action at the point of insight and in-workflow to streamline physician allocation, better patient and business outcomes are achieved. Patient wait times, the patient to physician ratio and operational costs are now within the acceptable range.

SaaS provider GeriMedica embeds Sisense into their core product to provide clinicians with patient insights and next steps to improve treatment plans. With these insights, GeriMedica’s customers saw an average decline of 6% (2 days) in admission days per patient for geriatric rehabilitation, resulting in €540 savings per patient. With 44,399 patients registered in their platform in 2021, this resulted in total savings of €24 million, reduced wait times, and ultimately better patient outcomes.

The Recipe for Success

For any Healthtech or SaaS that is looking to take that next step and deliver analytics across their organization or to their clients the need to understand the necessary steps to success. The Sisense Fusion platform is all about enabling organizations to take data and insights and drive instant decisions through embedding and infusing analytics. Here we will outline some of the key ingredients organizations need to think about to enable that success.

Complex Data

Working with data is complex and healthcare organizations face this challenge from the number of data sources they work with, and the need to prepare and combine the data so that all users have the data they need for more informed decision making when it comes to patient care and meeting their KPIs.

The Sisense Fusion platform was built specifically with this in mind – simplifying analytics so that non-technical users are empowered to make their own data-driven decisions. By allowing technical users to connect data from anywhere (cloud, in-application, on-premise), blend, prep and build powerful data models, and then easily query the model either live or in-memory, more accurate and advanced reporting can be provided to non-technical users, at scale. Imagine meshing data from Fusebill Billing and Deltek Resource Planning together and a hospital administrator reviewing a dashboard to understand billing, procedures and revenue broken down by departments, and then adjusting physician allocation based on their findings.

Self-Service

Non-technical users need to be able to make sense of the data they work with to support clinical and business decisions. Being able to easily explore, ask questions of the data and better understand anomalies are crucial so that they can get answers quickly and act on it. Sisense empowers users regardless of their data and technical maturity with self-service dashboards, and AI-driven capabilities – Simply Ask and Explanations. 

With Simply Ask, ask complex questions in plain English and receive a visualization for fast insights. Use Explanations to identify the most probable key drivers for a given change, better understand the business and determine actions to course correct. For example, hospital executives regularly conduct cost analysis of hospital admissions to meet financial KPIs. With a Sisense dashboard, if there are any anomalies in admissions data, they are presented with the top explanations such as number of surgical procedures, specialties, and average length of patient stays. They can then drill down and filter charts for a 360 degree view of the organization. Self-service uncovers critical insights, driving better workflows, patient care and business outcomes. 

Customizability

Healthcare organizations need to provide customized experiences to users to differentiate themselves in their industry and to drive impact. By customizing the look and feel of the Sisense Fusion platform and embedding AI-driven dashboards and alerting into existing workflows, products and services, the line between where analytics starts and ends is blurred. With the extensibility of Sisense and AI-powered analytics, an app developer could even provide insights without a data visualization in sight. Data would power user interface choices such as which menus and buttons are shown and enabled, and what data is shown in fields and indicators. 

For a hospital administrator reviewing patient wait times, embedding analytics and prescriptive actions into their internal systems removes the need to context switch or learn a new tool or workflow. They can easily see trends and respond, such as by clicking a button to schedule additional physicians to optimize physician-to-patient ratios, saving more lives and improving revenue margins. Having a fully customized experience where analytics resembles the everyday experience and is presented to the right person at the right time also increases product stickiness and adoption.

Actionability

Data is nothing without action. In fact, when healthcare organizations fail to act on data, it has cost them dearly – with reduced revenue and poor patient experience. Sisense Pulse alerts proactively detect anomalies and can automatically trigger workflows in their most commonly used applications such as HMS and communications platforms. With integrated workflows in Sisense, clinical staff could get prompts for next steps, such as reviewing patient care plans, or scheduling doctors to intervene to drive better results for patients. Sisense dashboards can also be embedded within the same applications to help users drill into the data, and easily share with teams and stakeholders.

Drive Change with Data

The use of data and actionable intelligence is transformative for the healthcare industry. By embedding Sisense into healthcare processes, workflows and services, we empower everyone to gain complete visibility across their business, conduct their own analysis and take the actions needed to streamline operations, improve patient care and reduce costs.