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Let’s find out how this tech concept can benefit your healthcare organization and in what ways and with which tools you can implement it in practice. Also, below, we’ll share general takeaways about our personal experience in the development of BI software based on one of the most popular customizable platforms: Tableau.
Business intelligence (BI) itself is a fairly new innovation and refers to the collection and use of data to improve business operations and strategic planning. Healthcare business intelligence builds on this same framework, but in this case, the data in question is patient data gathered through a variety of channels. Healthcare BI has a slightly different purpose than that explored earlier with BI alone. With healthcare BI, organizations are still looking for ways of improving operations and costs, but a greater primary focus is the goal of improving patient care.
Healthcare is a business area that is updated daily with enormous amounts of data. At the same time, this data can have a significant impact on assessing the current state of the business and choosing a future business strategy. This data growth happens through electronic medical records, administrative processes, medical research and trials, conducting surveys and reviews on social networks, etc. Considering the fragmented nature of the sources of this information and, accordingly, different types of data, it becomes clear why traditional tools for its analysis may be ineffective. This is where business intelligence for the healthcare industry comes to the rescue.
Broadly speaking, business intelligence combines tools and techniques that collect, store, sort, process, and analyze data to provide valuable insights and aid decision making. The practical results of using business analytics are reports, graphs, histograms, tables, dashboards, and other types of visualization that present these insights in a readable and understandable format.
Currently, there are many different business intelligence software healthcare tools, including cloud storage, data visualization solutions, reporting systems, and so on. Using them individually or together, healthcare organizations can integrate these healthcare business intelligence solutions with their established IT infrastructure and, thereby, generate reports and calculate critical KPIs based on relevant (but raw) data in real time.
At the same time, compared to other data collection tools, such as EHR, software for business intelligence in the healthcare industry usually has a much lower entry threshold, which allows them to be used by all employees of the organization without specialized and often lengthy training.
While patient care is a primary mandate for healthcare BI tools and software, businesses entering the market have the potential of realizing a very healthy return on their investment. The global healthcare analytics market is expected to grow to $99.38 billion in 2028 with a CAGR of 24.79% between 2023 and 2028. As for the region of market development, North America remains the undoubted leader here.
At the same time, according to Technavio research, the key restraining factor in the development of this niche is the limited number of open source hospital business intelligence software. This is why it can be difficult for small healthcare organizations to benefit from business analytics, as existing off-the-shelf solutions often lack customization capabilities. Therefore, it sometimes makes sense to think about custom development to solve the problem of constantly renewing licenses.
While there are many reasons to embrace healthcare BI, there are also some clearly obvious benefits that need to be mentioned.
Traditionally, valuable insights might be scattered across siloed systems – patient records, billing data, appointment logs. BI bridges these gaps, providing a unified view of a healthcare organization’s operations. Imagine a doctor with instant access to a patient’s entire medical history, treatment outcomes for similar cases, and even anonymized cost analysis for various procedures–all within a single platform. This empowers data-driven decision-making.
Resource allocation becomes more informed, with staffing levels adjusted based on real-time patient influx data. Additionally, BI allows for proactive identification of at-risk patients by analyzing trends in vital signs or medication adherence, potentially preventing costly complications and hospital readmissions. With a broader data landscape, BI empowers healthcare professionals to deliver more personalized care and ultimately, achieve better patient outcomes.
BI software streamlines workflows and boosts productivity. Imagine a hospital administrator instantly identifying bottlenecks in the emergency room by analyzing patient wait times and discharge data. BI empowers them to optimize staffing schedules, allocate resources efficiently, and ensure smoother patient flow. Furthermore, BI can automate repetitive tasks, like appointment reminders or report generation, freeing up valuable time for medical professionals to focus on patient care.
Additionally, by analyzing historical data, BI can predict future patient volumes, allowing clinics to anticipate staffing needs and avoid last-minute scrambling. This improved efficiency translates to shorter wait times, reduced administrative overhead, and ultimately, a more positive experience for both patients and healthcare staff. With BI, healthcare organizations can do more with less, ensuring optimal resource utilization and delivering quality care efficiently.
Imagine a doctor treating a diabetic patient – BI can analyze historical data to identify similar cases and their treatment outcomes. This empowers the doctor to personalize treatment plans, considering factors like medication efficacy and potential side effects for the specific patient. Additionally, BI can analyze trends in patient vitals and medication adherence, allowing for early identification of potential complications. With real-time alerts, healthcare providers can intervene proactively, preventing costly hospital readmissions and ensuring better patient outcomes. Furthermore, BI can flag patients due for preventive screenings or overdue vaccinations, prompting targeted outreach campaigns. This proactive approach promotes preventative care and empowers patients to take charge of their health. Ultimately, BI empowers healthcare professionals to deliver more personalized, data-driven care, leading to healthier patients and a stronger patient-provider relationship.
BI software acts as a financial microscope for healthcare organizations, revealing opportunities to boost profitability. By analyzing vast amounts of data, BI can pinpoint areas of waste, like unnecessary lab tests or duplicated procedures. This empowers healthcare providers to optimize resource allocation, ensuring the right staff and equipment are available where needed. Additionally, BI helps identify profitable service lines and patient populations, allowing for targeted marketing campaigns to attract patients seeking these high-value services. Furthermore, improved billing accuracy and faster claims processing through BI can significantly accelerate revenue collection, improving cash flow and financial health. Ultimately, BI software in healthcare isn’t just about better patient care, it’s about building a financially stronger organization.
In many parts of the world, including North America, healthcare is a business. While doctors and clinicians got into their roles to help people, money is still a driver that needs to be acknowledged. Running a medical practice or hospital is expensive with resource costs, tools, equipment, and pharmaceuticals all adding up. However, clinical BI tools can help drive these costs down in a variety of different ways.
Healthcare BI software can track populations and perform analysis to better understand the likelihood of illness and infection in specific areas and locations. Healthcare BI tools can improve communication and information sharing between different organizations and even between countries.
BI tools can be complicated and complex to use and understand. However, as healthcare itself has transformed, so have the BI tools that support healthcare. Now doctors and other healthcare experts have means of extracting information in a simple manner, without requiring an understanding of coding or databases.
Self-service tools make front-line staff more efficient and effective. They let healthcare providers access information in real-time to improve their ability to make decisions and judgments in a more timely manner. In addition, these self-service tools allow simple customization so that patients too can understand the information being presented.
In the past patient treatment was a matter of best guess more than anything. As time progressed and information was shared between physicians, researchers, and clinicians about what did and didn’t work for treatments, better treatment options were discovered and refined.
Health data intelligence helps take that a step further and helps doctors understand why a treatment that worked for one patient might or might not be suitable for another. Business analytics in healthcare can be further refined to demonstrate the risks of specific treatments based on a patient’s current condition and medication. Now treatments can be personalized based on specific genetic blueprints targeting treatments in a more concrete manner.
Evaluating staff performance relied on subjective observations or limited patient feedback. BI offers a more data-driven approach. Imagine analyzing patient satisfaction surveys alongside treatment outcomes for specific doctors. This allows healthcare organizations to identify top performers whose methods consistently yield positive results. BI can also analyze patterns in readmission rates or medication errors associated with particular caregivers, highlighting areas for improvement or potential training needs.
Additionally, BI can track appointment adherence and patient wait times – metrics that can reflect a caregiver’s time management and communication skills. By providing a holistic view of caregiver performance beyond subjective evaluations, BI empowers healthcare organizations to identify areas for staff development, ensure consistent quality of care, and ultimately, optimize patient outcomes.
Healthcare BI has multiple impacts on patient satisfaction. Better and more customized treatment ensures that patients receive targeted services focused on their specific illness or condition. Customized treatment options drive improved patient outcomes, leading to overall better quality of life. In addition, clinical and hospital BI helps make the facilities themselves more efficient and effective, improving wait times and overall service levels.
As for more specific cases of business intelligence software in healthcare, formally, we can highlight eleven different use cases. Let’s consider each of them in more detail below to understand how healthcare analytics and BI can benefit healthcare organizations in practice.
Thanks to business intelligence implementation, healthcare organizations can analyze their patients’ personal data to identify patterns in their health status and, thus, make their prescription of treatment plans more accurate than ever before. This approach has a positive impact on their quality of patient care, which means patients will return to them again and again. Moreover, by improving the results of diagnostic procedures, organizations are able to reduce the costs associated with repeated (and ineffective) examinations of patients, which means they can eliminate this gap in their budget over time.
Business intelligence and predictive analytics in healthcare can provide healthcare organizations significant help in conducting global research of public health. In particular, by collecting relevant data from multiple sources, they help identify unobvious trends in public health, identify key risk factors, and predict the most effective interventions for specific population segments. You can also find out the difference between business intelligence and data analytics in detail here.
Business intelligence automation implemented in personnel management processes, can ensure significant assistance to HR departments in healthcare organizations by providing their employees with relevant insights regarding problems with staff turnover, problems in the distribution of work tasks between other employees, gaps in costs associated with attracting new specialists, etc.
Thanks to business analytics solutions, medical centers and other healthcare organizations are able to protect their activities from unreliable clients, inefficient waste of resources, and misuse of patient data. At the same time, valuable conclusions are generated in a matter of moments, without the need to involve expensive specialists in these tasks.
Smart analytical solutions are capable of providing employees of medical institutions with current data on inventories, consumer demand, and the workload of transport resources in real time. Thanks to this, they can reduce the cost of transporting their assets without reducing turnover.
Among other business intelligence examples, the application of this technological concept in clinical research deserves special attention—here, advanced BI tools are capable of analyzing enormous volumes of unstructured data, thereby having a positive effect on the results of these studies.
BI reporting tools help healthcare sector representatives generate reports and analytics based on data collected in real time. By doing so, they can ensure better compliance while also optimizing their financial health.
By implementing business intelligence solutions for end-to-end processing of financial data and assets, healthcare companies can significantly optimize their revenue cycles. They can also receive additional opportunities to improve services related to medical insurance for their patients.
With all the benefits that IoT technology brings, healthcare organizations can also benefit further from business intelligence solutions by combining them to more effectively monitor the condition of their patients. They can also regularly monitor all aspects of safety and the use of medical equipment in general to minimize the risks associated with intentional and unintentional harm.
Being deployed along the perimeter of a company’s network infrastructure, business intelligence solutions are able to independently identify suspicious network activity and notify system administrators in order to take preventive measures to protect critical information. They’re also capable of automatically starting backup and disaster recovery processes. All of these features simplify the management of complex digital systems while increasing their reliability.
Finally, business intelligence solutions can assist medical center employees in processing data from disparate sources in order to study the impact of certain medications on the health of patients. In particular, this approach speeds up the process of processing and drawing useful conclusions based on the collected information. Also, it minimizes the risks associated with subjective judgments on the part of living specialists.
Healthcare BI software is a subset of BI software targeted towards the healthcare market. These tools provide specialists in the medical field with an improved way of reviewing data gathered from different sources. These sources could include patient files and medical records but can be expanded to include additional information such as financial records and more, to better enable the facility in their care and treatment planning. Healthcare BI tools integrate with other software in a medical establishment, but it’s crucial to understand that it’s not the same as software like electronic medical record (EMR) and electronic health record (EHR) software.
As one of the data visualization leaders in the BI marketplace, Tableau helps organizations create and publish dashboards extremely easily. Tableau has some inbuilt data preparation tools that simplify the process of gathering information. Tableau also has some prepared templates for users in the healthcare market which helps even further with implementation, letting organizations quickly drill down into their information.
Power BI is a Microsoft product and as such is very familiar to users of the Office suite. It also integrates directly with other Microsoft products like Excel and SharePoint, and lets users analyze, model, and graphically represent data in a variety of different dashboards and reports. Power BI is fairly intuitive and easy to use with a built-in AI engine that lets users analyze clinical data quickly and easily.
Like Tableau, Sisense has dedicated integrations for the healthcare market. However, this modern business intelligence software takes it perhaps a step further with a healthcare analytics module built specifically for healthcare information and data. Sisense lets you pipe healthcare data in from a variety of different data sources so you integrate all of the different touchpoints in a single interactive dashboard.
This interactive platform empowers medical professionals to explore vast datasets intuitively. Imagine a doctor drilling down through patient records, diagnoses, and treatment histories with just a few clicks. Qlik Sense’s associative engine fosters real-time data exploration, allowing healthcare providers to uncover hidden patterns and connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. This data-driven approach can lead to improved diagnoses, more personalized treatment plans, and ultimately, better patient outcomes.
While the term “Driver Platform” is less specific in the BI space, it could potentially refer to a data integration platform that feeds information into a BI tool. Here’s a description tailored to that concept. In healthcare, data silos can hinder valuable insights. Driver Platforms act as data wranglers, seamlessly connecting various healthcare information systems. Imagine a platform that gathers data from Electronic Health Records (EHRs), billing systems, and appointment calendars. This unified data stream becomes the fuel for BI tools, enabling comprehensive analysis of patient care, resource allocation, and overall healthcare operations. Driver Platforms empower healthcare organizations to leverage the full potential of their data, leading to better decision-making and improved patient outcomes.
As a leader in software development, as well as development of custom products based on business intelligence in healthcare, NIX was contracted to build a solution for a global organization. This company was looking for a way of improving the information available to company executives. Executives were interested in the visualization of key performance indicators related to finance, quality of care, and clinical services.
The NIX team used data from multiple different applications to determine the key areas that needed to be measured. They determined that the best path forward was the use of Tableau as business intelligence software for healthcare. Tableau was visually appropriate and integrated with all of the systems, but also provided the security that the organization needed in terms of patient information.
NIX worked with Tableau extensively and also implemented a separate Java-based component to further improve security and authentication. In addition, another component was added which improved the scheduling of data extracts. The NIX team successfully built a solution for business intelligence in healthcare in a very short timeframe that met all of the client requirements, leading to a successful product launch shortly thereafter. If you’re interested in healthcare business intelligence and are looking for a partner with experience for your project, contact us. At NIX we understand the business of software and the healthcare industry and can help you ensure that you succeed in both.
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