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Vast amounts of healthcare data pours into practices, clinics, hospitals and all other healthcare organizations daily. In the meantime, large efforts to digitize legacy records continues apace. All of this information sits at the fingertips of clinicians and business managers waiting to be used to improve clinical care and business practices. With the right analytics plan, the bigger picture emerges for healthcare organizations, leading to more efficient processes and higher quality patient experience. Those in charge of converting patient care into reimbursements can seek and eliminate inefficiencies in their business processes for a healthier bottom line. How do you make full use of your available data?
You know where your information resides. If it is compartmentalized in a variety of unconnected legacy applications, your analytics will necessarily be disjointed and unwieldly as you stitch together reports on spreadsheets. For example, if you wanted to know how many of your patients were prescribed CPAP machines and what the average payer allowance was, could you do it with just a few clicks on your computer? You can piece together a reports for data analytics, but it may be a lot like trying to make heads or tails out of an x-ray film that was first shredded then taped back together. So, the first step of your strategy should be to link stand-alone information portals and information silos, then integrate the data across workflow processes. However, by leaving your legacy applications in place, rather than utilizing a customized application, is more akin to souping up an old muscle car hoping for the performance of a Lamborghini. Since your competitors will soon be racing in a Lamborghini, is it wise to challenge them with a '72 Chevelle?
Once you've settled on a strategy, the concept and goal of pulling all of the patient, administrative, HR, vendor and supply chain activity into one searchable platform needs real world implementation. This can be extremely tricky, as you are about to revolutionize the entire business process. By developing an ERP with your IT staff and soliciting input from the rest of the staff regarding what they would like to achieve from an integrated system, you can model the concept, anticipate problems, correct for them and settle on a well-designed system.
By defining organizational goals and benchmarks to guide the team to successful fulfillment thereof, you can then build into your ERP the analytic tools that find and report the data you need. You can program in your organization's KPIs and have regular reports generated. By analyzing the KPIs you should be able to detect weak links in the processes of care delivery, reimbursement, employee management and consumed resources. Drilling down, you'll quickly find the sources of any detected issues and take corrective action, which is the main purpose behind data analytics.
To make the entire agenda of data collection, reporting and analytics efficient, any process that can be automated, including report generation, should be. With the power of technology, repetitive, low-value tasks, such as digging through financials and disparate departmental reports on a regular basis, can be set up so that data is garnered for specific reports as it comes into the system. Reports become as easy a click or two. As another example of the potential in automation, your software can generate patient files from the front desk, populate the files and claims forms directly from the input of the clinicians, and automatically send the claims to the payer or trigger self-pay billing. Then, it can monitor and process payer activity while your back office staff focuses on more high-value work. You can accomplish a more organized workflow with fewer workers or human error.
Depending on the size of the HCO, designing and implementing a global application that delivers your data when and how you want it could be worked in-house with local infrastructure. But for the sake of economy, smaller enterprises can benefit by choosing a proven, reputable service provider with a cloud-based platform that can easily scale to need and fill any custom requirements.
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