Data is the most important factor in the world today, being the straightforward difference between a successful organization and a failed one. It lies at the core of businesses, helping them make informed decisions and back their strategy with relevant proofs. Similarly, data is the ultimate answer to all the emerging problems around the world, only if someone digs into it. In other words, data can break or make your business depending upon your approach towards it.
But, in many situations, it isn’t about the quantity of data. Most businesses have plenty of data right at their hands but don’t know what to do with it. Others struggle to find out relevant information out of it. Ultimately it all comes down to having the right kind of data for your organization. You might have gathered petabytes of data, but if they don’t help you see through your customer’s behaviors, what use they can possibly be. And this is just one example. The utility and relevance of data vary from one industry or organization to the other.
The Healthcare and Data
The healthcare industry is one of the most crucial industries in the world. Be its contribution to the economic growth of the country or its life-saving characteristics, healthcare is something that needs constant attention at all times. Statistics suggest that the healthcare industry is expected to grow at a striking rate of 36 percent per year through the coming years, until 2025.
While the number appears small, it is fast than other industries such as manufacturing, financial services along with media and entertainment. But the numbers are indeed astonishing considering how slow the progress was being made only a few years back. For example, it was 11 years ago when only 9.4 percent of healthcare hospitals had adopted the basic electronic health records system.
But here we are today in a much rapidly transforming healthcare sector where fast decisions are being made, algorithms are assisting doctors to decide the course of treatment taking into account a patient’s history, demographical and other information, robots are performing surgeries, medical facilities are being monitored and managed by machine learning models running on the cloud and humanoids are being deployed in the home of the elderly so that they receive adequate care in the absence of human caretakers.
With many such undergoing developments, it all comes down to the quality of data that an organization has to carry on with a change. The aim of transforming the healthcare industry is becoming not to just see patients but change this approach to more value-based care. Patients must have their say in their treatment and receive value-based care, instead of just being treated for a particular condition and them being left off. Believe it or not, but this approach is also changing the mode of payment for hospitals across the world.
And this is just the beginning. With the amount of data in the picture, algorithms are also leaving behind the judgment of doctors when it comes to rare diseases like breast cancers. A new development by Google’s Deep Mind AI and Healthcare system indicate that the machine learning algorithm was trained over as many as 70,000 images from women belonging to the UK and US strikingly able to reduce the number of false positives and negatives. The best part was that the algorithm only had X-rays as the training data, while the medical experts and radiologists who made predictions manually had access to both the mammograms and patient’s health information.
Those days are long gone when the hospitals were paid off depending on the number of services they provide or more accurately a fee for service model. Many organizations in the world are reinventing this model and establishing a rein by being paid for the value they provide to their patients. Take the Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services as an example. Instead of a service-based model, they have a value-based model when it comes to payments. With a fee for value payments, they compensate the doctors and hospitals based on the quality of care provided.
Electronic health records today have more than plenty of information. Even though their adoption is mostly limited to the developed countries, they still possess a lot of information for carrying out research. It surely needs to grab the attention of the concerned organizations to make an impact on patient care and the state of the healthcare industry right now.
But, even though organizations have looked upon the aspects of the healthcare industry in terms of care quality, patient volume, and expenditure data to measure the performance of the industry as a whole, they have largely overlooked other parameters. Some of these are patient retention, attraction, and repatriation. Let’s briefly take a look at these:
Attraction
Hospitals and other medical facilities have seldom thought of attracting new patients because there was already a huge inflow coming through the doors. Moreover, there is a lot of competition among patients with commercial healthcare insurance plans as compared to others. This is where data analytics plays a role. Organizations must study the data of the patients that they have failed to attract or lost to competition. With this, patients who visit a general physician or a local healthcare facility can be attracted to a specialty center for advanced treatment options.
Retention
Just like an ordinary business, hospitals too need to keep a check on their patients once they are discharged from their facility. This not only means that there is an earning potential for the hospital but also a value-based care system for the customer.
Repatriation
Analyzing health records through data analytics can also shed light on which patients must be repatriated into the system for additional care or services. The organization’s ability to reach out to these patients depends on the number of factors such as the services provided to them in the past or their urgency etc.
Conclusion
As the Healthcare IT Services providers continue to gather and hone this data, it is insightful to consider those factors that hitherto haven’t been though upon. With the right data on the table, there is a lot more than the organizations can do towards increasing value-based care for patients.
