Future-proof healthcare with advanced analytics

Symptoms of change in the healthcare industry

The massive changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated the digital transformation of the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers that traditionally relied on in-person interaction with patients must now offer improved digital experiences. As the industry prepares for the post-Covid new normal, it must also respond to the changing dynamics of the industry to improve patient outcomes, retain customers and stay competitive. These include the shift to value-based healthcare, the surge in demand for telehealth, and the aggregation of big data across systems, EHRs, and IoMT. 

Using analytics is like going to the gym—organizations know it is essential to maintain the overall financial health but often fail to implement it regularly throughout all lines of business, due to various constraints. Some healthcare organizations feel restricted by inflexible patchwork legacy systems that don’t scale in response to demand, while others migrating to the cloud are frustrated by the lack of choice that their vendors offer. 

Additionally, there is a significant skills gap for the end-users of health tech. Physicians and clinical staff, already overloaded with caregiving responsibilities, often lack the time to wade through complicated dashboards that could provide the analytics insights they need to optimize treatment.  

A spoonful of analytics for healthier outcomes

Healthcare’s challenge could be its best opportunity. The Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision Report 2021 suggests that the technology choices that healthcare organizations make today could impact their value proposition significantly in the near future. 

It recommends healthcare enterprises compete by reimagining what their services and operations should look like and use the right technology stack and modular, flexible building blocks that enable business agility in real-time. By investing in scalable technologies like API-first analytics and cloud, the healthcare industry can become future-proof. 

Benefits of healthcare analytics

Key players in the industry such as healthcare providers to payers and technology solutions vendors can leverage healthcare analytics to increase the value they provide to customers and patients by giving more personalized care, streamlining operations, accelerating revenue, planning resource allocation and medical supplies inventory, and reducing costs while ensuring sustainable profits in a changing environment. SaaS providers can benefit from faster time to market, reduced time to deploy, and can avoid vendor lock-in with a cloud-agnostic embedded analytics solution.

Analytics provides deeper visibility into the crucial KPIs that matter for healthcare. Healthcare KPIs such as Average Hospital Stay, ER Wait Times, Hospital Readmissions, Patient Satisfaction, and financial metrics like Number of Claims Denied, First Pass Yield, for example, indicate how successful your organization is in achieving its goals of providing optimal healthcare and ensuring financial stability. 

These KPIs also encourage processes that will lead to improvements in the business and patient outcomes. With the right analytics platform, organizations within the healthcare ecosystem can easily visualize their KPIs to analyze business data, get meaningful insights, set benchmarks, and take action to stay competitive.   

Improve customer satisfaction, gain competitive advantage

Analytics is the catalyst to achieving some of the key business priorities and strategic initiatives of healthcare leaders. According to recent research by Gartner, healthcare leaders (LoBs) have outlined some of their top business priorities. 32% cite improvement of customer satisfaction, while another 17% have emphasized that improving products and services quality is a top business initiative. The challenge here is to improve customer and ultimately, patient satisfaction and align it with the organization’s need for profitability and sustainable expansion. 

With the right healthcare analytics solution, healthcare providers can reduce the time required to leverage the data siloed in medical devices and systems across the organization to gain a competitive advantage and increase value to customers.

GeriMedica, a Saas provider for healthcare professionals in the elderly care sector leveraged Sisense embedded analytics in its core product to provide their end-users, medical professionals and caregivers, with patient insights into common treatments or health paths. Doctors and caregivers drill down into user-friendly dashboards to phase out treatments that did not work to streamline care paths for a given set of patients within a unit. Analytics adoption by the end-users is high, resulting in improved scheduling and care. ROI was realized within six weeks of embedding Sisense, as Gerimedica gained new customers. It improved productivity and scheduling to enable doctors to spend 2x time with patients that needed the most care and improved treatment quality by delivering actionable insights to caregivers.  

Improve revenue with financial KPIs

Per the Gartner report, 26% of healthcare leaders cite increases in revenue growth as a top business priority. One KPI that tracks this is the percentage of claims denied by insurers which is a common cause of revenue loss for hospitals. Healthcare providers and payers know that efficient claims management is key to ensuring financial health and profitability. Embedded analytics provides the speed and accuracy required for faster claims cycles, rapid revenue generation, and reduced losses.  

Here’s a peek into how claims processors have leveraged analytics to improve revenues for their customers. OS Healthcare embedded Sisense analytics into efficientC, its software platform that enables their customers – hospitals and medical centers- to get their claims paid faster by insurers. Customers have rapidly adopted easy-to-use, interactive dashboards to stay on top of payment trends and take immediate action on any red flag deviations that could potentially affect revenue. With Sisense embedded analytics, efficientC accelerated revenue generation for customers with 95% of claims now getting paid within 20 days or less, by reducing denied claims by 40% within 60 days and improving cash flow by 15% on average.    

Improve operations, minimize patient readmission

Unplanned and higher patient readmission rates are a key metric as they could indicate problems in treatment effectiveness and quality of care, while negatively impacting overheads productivity and availability of services and beds for new patients. According to Gartner, 25% of healthcare leaders cite reduction in operational costs as a top business priority. Analytics can help hospitals pinpoint the factors that are causing the uptick in readmissions—is it the treatment plan, or the conditions of the ward—and subsequently plan actions to mitigate the risks.  

Union General hospital used Sisense self-service BI to track this crucial KPI to achieve its goal of preventative patient care. It wanted to rapidly pull up reports and insights from disparate data sources like patient EMRs (electronic medical records), patient charts, and clinicians’ operational information to get insights on how to reduce readmissions. Reporting times were reduced by 200%, resulting in more near real-time insights that the care team could use to intervene and lower readmissions sooner.  

Buy, don’t build

Healthcare providers increasingly prefer low-code, easy-to-use analytics tools that minimize workflow disruption to meet their challenges and stay profitable. Connecting to multiple data sources and generating insights that reach the right medical and operational teams at the right time leads to improved patient, operational and financial outcomes from the get-go. Further, SaaS providers can amplify their offering by embedding a third-party analytics platform into their products. 

Embedded analytics providers have customizable solutions packed with all the bells and whistles and the required security compliance that can be tailored for each unique use case. There is no real incentive to build from scratch, reports Constellation Research’s Principal Analyst Doug Henschen.

Democratize health technology

Sisense’s independent analytics platform empowers healthcare providers, payers, and service providers to gain crucial visibility into metrics across the business to help them adjust their plans and processes to stay on track with business objectives. It offers the flexibility of a low-code and code-first, API-first platform to provide a highly customizable, and cloud-agnostic solution that fits a multitude of use cases. Additionally, Sisense’s robust security, governance, and compliance capabilities help healthcare organizations maintain HIPAA standards.  

Sisense takes analytics to the next level, by infusing it into healthcare processes and workflows to help bypass the skills gap. End-users, like clinicians or hospital staff, no longer face a steep learning curve to get their analytics and are empowered to take action in real-time to remedy problems without having to go through IT. They can access their analytics in the applications or CRMs that they commonly use, to make optimal decisions easily using data, not instinct,  while freeing up time to focus on more strategic tasks.  

Sisense’s low-code platform empowers non-technical users to quickly generate reports that would typically take days or months to run, while analysts can take advantage of the code-first functionalities to pull in insights with SQL, R, and Python to generate the in-depth analysis they seek. Further, its Natural Language Processing capabilities empower users to ask their data questions in plain language, get Pulse Alerts to flag any alarming trends and receive actionable insights to respond to situations before they turn into a crisis. 

Healthcare faces new challenges and opportunities as it prepares to reshape itself for the post-pandemic reality. Healthcare is now a digital business like many others, and leaders who can capitalize on this new reality with embedded analytics will be able to ensure the innovation for their business that is indispensable in a dynamic and uncertain future.  

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