Analytics The Change Driver For Smart Healthcare

“Data is the new oil of the digital economy”. This phrase, while cliched, is especially true for the healthcare industry. Within healthcare reams and reams of data is collected through multiple channels and customer touchpoints. However, very little of it is churned effectively enough to affect patient outcomes. It is not as if there are not enough efforts, analytics platforms across the globe claim to be and have been successful in mining, analysing, and generating critical insights from health data. Yet, we have “miles to go before we sleep”. This article specifically discusses how meaningful analytics can become a driver of change within the current healthcare ecosystem.

Unfortunately, majority of the data analytics platforms today act as retrospective recommendations engines. These platforms build fancy graphs and observations from past data and generate insightful reports for management teams. Using analytics as a proactive change agent, however, has more potential to drive change within healthcare by empowering and enhancing the three pillars – Quality of care, Access to care, and Cost of care.

Quality of care

Quality of care is tough to define but there is growing acceptance to measure health services by their ability to be effective, safe, and people oriented. Analytics can be leveraged to identify issues and help organizations improve along these dimensions.

For example, consider a patient getting admitted for a knee replacement surgery. At the time of admission, a “well-built analytics platform” should be able to profile the patient, match the patient with past patients having similar demographics, predict potential complications and suggest a path to best outcomes. Such inputs will not only enable doctors to improve the effectiveness of the surgery but also provide customized recommendations for patient safety. Similarly, when a doctor is prescribing a drug, an analytics platform could provide information related to the efficacy of the drug on similar patients along with insights into side effects, etc. For patients looking to buy specific drugs, such platforms could provide the nearest location, price, etc thereby reducing wait times.

Analysing data can thus help health systems to allocate resources to improve their efficiency and population health. But more importantly, patient care.

Access to care

Access to care entails the ability to use health services in a timely manner to achieve the best health outcomes. Although access to care is typically correlated with insurance coverage, analytics platforms could provide critical population health insights and allow governments to set up care centres, based on patient records. For example, analytics on patient records could provide insights into geographies, customer demographics that are more prone to diabetes-related complications. Governments can take such insights and set up care centres to proactively manage diabetic patients in such regions.

Cost of Care

Cost of care is arguably the most discussed topic in the healthcare ecosystem. Analytics platforms possess the ability to dig deeper into the drivers affecting costs which could range from the cost of prescription drugs to consultation charges.

For example, patients could be guided to providers offering cheaper services based on the ailment type and quality of care. Separately, with the help of the data, the insurance industry could save money by supporting wearables and health trackers to ensure that patients do not spend time in the hospital.

Big data and advanced analytics offer tremendous potential to solve some of healthcare’s barriers while improving its efficiency and effectiveness. Technology is transforming healthcare at a faster pace globally with access to patient data playing an integral part in driving this shift. In the future, analytics will play a fundamental role in improving the health of people, reducing mortality across age groups by providing predictive healthcare.