In order for healthcare practices to understand every aspect of their financial and operational performance, they must collect as well as analyze data to identify what changes would improve clinical efficiencies as well as increase revenue.
Fortunately, an intuitive and interactive business intelligence (BI) platform can help you leverage all this information to make informed decisions rather than perform manual data gathering.
Business Intelligence Is a Game-Changer For Private Practices
Business intelligence software aids providers in collecting patient information, analyzing metric patterns, organizing reports as well as creating charts using data from clinical questionnaires, surveys, electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR) and social media campaigns. As a result of these insights gained through BI, practices can quickly identify areas of strength or weakness and use them to make changes that will improve patient outcomes, increase profits as well as keep patients proactively engaged.
BI and analytics provide you with a complete overview of your practice which helps you create a plan of action to meet your business goals. With a strong BI solution, you are able to access key performance indicators (KPI) that can pinpoint inefficiencies of which your practice should optimize through automation or process refinement.
How to Use Business Intelligence Tools to Overcome Healthcare Data Challenges
While BI in healthcare can help streamline care, reduce staff overhead, increase patient satisfaction and maximize revenue, there are some data challenges that come along with it, including:
- Data Security
- Data Quality
- Data Sharing
Data Security
Since the advent of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), healthcare organizations have been responsible for meeting stringent standards related to the collection, use and maintenance of each patient’s personal health information (PHI). Consistently meeting HIPAA mandates was already cumbersome, but the rise in cybersecurity attacks has only amplified the need for extensive, robust data security. As a result, today’s practices face the challenge of complying to HIPAA but also still have health records accessible for data analysis.
Data Quality
Another data management challenge in healthcare is handling the large volumes of unstructured data—including images, videos and other visuals that practices may capture. These unstructured types of data are not as commonly supported by electronic medical/health record (EMR/EHR) systems as you may think, so practices should seek EMR/EHR software that is interoperable and can glean valuable patient information from any data source.
Data Sharing
Not only must practices have access to data on their own patients, but they should also be able to share that information with other organizations such as hospitals, research centers, referral providers and pharmacies. However, this data sharing, while beneficial to the convenience of patient outcomes, introduces new layers of privacy and data management issues.
At present, there is no universal data storage approach in healthcare, which makes it difficult to achieve interoperability with other healthcare organizations’ medical data management systems. To overcome these challenges, ensure that your software protects all PHI while following security best practices to protect your organization from cyberattacks. Additionally, by using a BI platform that has the ability to integrate other analytical sources, including those that contain product, sales or operational information, you’ll gain a complete 360° overview of your organization’s performance trends and enable data-driven decisions that will optimize your practice’s flexible functionality.
Improve Patient Outcomes and Enhance Engagement
When your patients achieve positive health outcomes and are happy with the care they receive, they are more likely to return to your practice as well as refer their friends or family to you. A powerful BI solution can help you efficiently manage clinical information and stay connected to patients throughout their entire care journey.
- Access to Patient History. By gaining access to a patient’s history and examining prior prescriptions, providers can tailor an individualized treatment plan and avoid relying on a one-size-fits-all plan of care. BI can especially help with monitoring visit trends and improving patient experiences through the use of marketing tools or engagement campaigns.
- Tracking of Test Results. No one wants to spend extra time and money taking redundant tests. BI software helps track results, organize groups of information as well as identify data relationships via interactive reporting filters, individualized dashboard views and custom dropdowns.
- Disease Prevention. BI software can analyze patient records and notify alerts to genetic markers that indicate vulnerability to specific medical conditions (i.e. Covid). As a result, providers can better assess both descriptive and predictive analytics in addition to facilitating real time communication, including telehealth.
- Patient Satisfaction. BI software empowers patients to offer feedback through surveys and other clinical questionnaires.
- Social Media. In order to foster relationships with patients outside of the office, make sure your BI platform offers engagement reports that help you navigate which posts are trending and map out geospatial data with location intelligence features that help your business target specific demographic audiences.
- Automated Campaigns. To keep a steady stream of outbound communications going, practices can automate various types of outreach, including appointment reminders and email blast messages.
Use BI to Streamline RCM and Operations
Monitoring key performance indicators or productivity metrics allows your practice to adopt important insight into the front and back end of your operations. As an added benefit, BI software provides financial summaries by charges, payments and adjustments, all of which help you evaluate the true reimbursement for underpayments, reduce claim errors for denial management as well monitor collections. Tracking all of this will not only increase billing transparency and enhance your patient revenue cycle but most importantly it may even improve your bottom line.
Innovations in business intelligence allow patients to take a more active role in their healthcare engagement while also optimizing provider efficiencies, click here to learn more about Raintree’s BI and Analytics offering.
