The explosion of Big Data in healthcare can lead to information paralysis if the appropriate systems are not in place. Business intelligence is an umbrella term for all the tools, infrastructure and software necessary to access and analyze data to improve decision-making and organizational performance. This is a very broad approach, which needs to be refined so that it can be useful and drive visible ROI and increase in patient satisfaction rates.
Where Is BI Transforming Healthcare?
The first thing any healthcare organization needs to do is to define the areas where BI could have maximum impact, then pick the low-hanging fruit first and move toward more sophisticated applications. It is about turning data into information, and information into action.
Financial data management
Revenue cycle management is one of the biggest hassles of healthcare. The shorter the period between billing and reimbursement, the better the cash flow and the less risk of financial bottlenecks. BI implementation can help organizations to track the status of each claim to evaluate the health of their revenue streams. Such a system can eliminate duplicate requests, compute denial rates and resubmit cases, if necessary.
A BI system is also an excellent tool to manage budgets and money allocation among departments. If the mechanism is based on predictive analytics, it can help to minimize wastage by identifying the right time to discharge patients without the risk of doing so too soon.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) management
Digital records are mandatory and can help both the patient and the caregiver to streamline the administrative processes. However, unless the data stored in these repositories are up-to-date and used, it is just another cost to bear. BI tools can scan through the EHR and retrieve the data the doctor or staff members need at that moment.
A good BI solution also has a forward-thinking module based on predictive analytics and uses the patient’s data to help them care better for their health. If the module is linked to an AI algorithm that determines the likelihood of dangerous illnesses, it can trigger warning signals and give recommendations to help patients change their lifestyle for the better.
Personalized medicine and BI can help increase life duration and quality by providing the patient with the right recommendations for their conditions. For example, if a patient has a high risk of developing type II diabetes, the system can send them personalized diets and exercise regimes to fight that before the illness even occurs.
EHR is not only updatable by the medical staff. The explosion of IoT wearable devices means that BI tools can get data from the patient’s device and feed it into the system to create a complete profile, which includes not only lab test results but also lifestyle data.
Treatment design
Business intelligence tools can be the entry point for AI-driven platforms which design drugs and treatment plans. The data gathered in healthcare BI constitutes the training base for algorithms that aim to determine where the current treatment fails. This is a way of leveraging data and turning it into valuable know-how by means of machine learning.
Prevention
One of the leading approaches when it comes to healthcare is prevention instead of treatment. A BI system focusing on DNA analysis can identify genetic markers which show the risk of deadly diseases. Looking into the patient’s EHR can be the first step in creating a new lifestyle for the patient or an entire category of patients sharing the same problems and genetic determinants.
Anticipation of peaks
A well-tuned BI system can also predict patientsneeds based on in-house data and public data such as weather report, census records, and even news. A medical center can use its BI system and anticipate the moments when it can face busier moments, for example when there is a disease outbreak, like seasonal flu. This can help the hospital to plan in terms of staff, drug supplies and even routes to redirect patients to other facilities or discharge those who are already feeling better.
Administrative tasks
Even outside the healthcare industry, BI systems are used to improve organizational efficiency. An upgrade from query-based models would be to implement natural language processing so that the database can be available to all staff members with minimal training. User-friendly analytics means allowing employees to ask questions to the system as they would do in a natural conversation. The Colchester Hospital reported a 76% decrease in the reporting time after using such a system. The financial savings from this type of productivity rose to over $77K.
Challenges of Using BI for Healthcare
Although there is a projected increase in healthcare technology spending, most of the times this is not directed toward upgrading providers’ BI systems. Some companies don’t see the point in investing in these types of systems which are expensive at the beginning but offer savings and increased efficiency in the long run.
Another obstacle is, paradoxically, the data. Since there is so much of it available in many forms, stored in different ways, each belonging to a different era, there is the need to aggregate it and put it in a usable form. Since most healthcare organizations don’t take the time to organize such data or even to define their challenges typically solved by data analysts, BI remains an underestimated tool.
Conclusion
Already heavily used in finance and logistics, BI tools are a step forward in increasing efficiency, saving time and money, and streamlining operations. Especially for the healthcare sector, these can have an added value when it comes to managing the patient’s lifestyle and contributing to a better life and disease management.
From the organizational perspective, implementing BI tools comes with a hefty price tag at the beginning, which can have a negative impact. However, once all is set up, the ROI quickly compensates the costs and even comes with additional advantages, like developing new drugs and treatments.
