Executive Summary
Every industry stands to benefit from the savvy use of business intelligence, but few have as much at stake as healthcare. Healthcare providers leverage the insights they gain by applying BI tools to traditional financial and operational processes, as well as clinical processes with direct effects on patient health. With evidence-based insight into such processes, patient protocols, treatment outcomes and disease management across large populations can be improved significantly.
Those objectives are even more critical as providers enter a new era in healthcare delivery — driven by the Affordable Care Act — where volume-driven care based on fee-for-service models gives way to value-driven reimbursement based on outcomes. Providers will increasingly rely on advanced BI and analytics solutions to gain insight into patient, financial and other data to achieve quality of care and cost-efficiency objectives.
Filtering the volumes of data that they and external parties generate, and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time across stakeholder networks, is a growing challenge. Much of the patient data now stored is still paper-based, and digital data tends to be trapped in silos across most organizations.
Providers will need to extract the appropriate data and stage it in ways that make it understandable and accessible to data specialists, administrators and general users. Based on the resulting intelligence, providers can make informed decisions and take actions to improve processes and, ultimately, treatment outcomes.
Healthcare providers today are already working hard to implement and demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs), adopt ICD-10 (the 10th revision of the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), and meet accountable care organization (ACO) mandates. Throw next-generation BI tools, advanced analytics and new data processing techniques into the mix, and it’s easy to see why many in the healthcare industry feel overwhelmed — and intimidated.
But organizations must begin to understand BI and analytics technologies in order to realize all of the rich benefits BI can inject into their operations.
