Business intelligence (BI) plays a big role among insight-driven organizations. It helps companies analyze previous data in improving efficiency and streamlining business operations. While many companies have recognized the importance of this game-changing technology, the healthcare industry has always been slow to adapt to the changing tech trends.
Healthcare organizations evaluate themselves using key performance indicators (KPI), such as patient safety, patient satisfaction, and staff management. But the use of a BI software tool can improve KPI metrics by providing reports and visualizations from different sources. As a result, organizations obtain a better insight on improving the overall patient experience.
Given the importance of healthcare in everyone’s life, it is crucial to know how BI software tools can shape the patient experience. Here are the essential things you should know how BI can contribute to the efficiency of healthcare organizations.
Monitoring Patient Outcomes
As a healthcare service provider, you need to know if your employees are doing a great job providing care and medical treatments. Knowing the effectiveness of your treatments can help evaluate your medical services and conduct follow-up treatments as required. But obtaining data on patient outcomes can be challenging. Once sending the patients to their homes to recover, it can be difficult to stay in contact with them.
Conducting surveys and follow-up calls are effective ways to gather data from your previous patients. Ask them about their overall experience and treatment success. If they decide to return for further treatment, you can collect and compare the data with other patients’ previous stays.
A BI tool will then create a report that reveals which of your treatments have been most successful and which ones are not. These insights will help improve your medical services by improving staff performance and evaluating care and drug efficacy.
This strategy is beneficial to healthcare companies that offer mobile integrated healthcare services. A BI tool will help them determine how coordinated care benefits health organizations, patients, and community health.
Monitoring Patient Stays
Healthcare organizations should learn how to balance the need to keep patients under their care to maximize the limited space available. Letting patients stay too long can lead to organizational efficiency while releasing them too soon would mean depriving them of the medical attention they need.
BI tools can determine the target stay length of the patients as long as medically required. You can sort data using a patient’s average stay length depending on their condition. This way, it will be easy to identify if you are meeting the target stay length for patients with specific ailments.
Managing patient safety
Patient safety is one of the most important KPI metrics for healthcare organizations. The last thing you want is to worsen a patient’s condition or cause them to develop a new one. The role of BI tools comes in handy when it comes to monitoring safety issues in your hospital or clinic. A BI tool can create a visual presentation listing all complications and contagious diseases over the past years. The data revealed by BI can help you develop strict measures to improve your healthcare practices.
Reducing Readmission Cases
Patient readmission means an additional cost for an organization. While this can be an unpleasant experience for you and the patient, you have to provide them the medical treatment they need.
To avoid patients coming back for additional treatments, healthcare organizations should identify their high-risk patients. Knowing which patients require thorough treatment will help you provide the care they need. This way, you can ensure that they experience full recovery after their release.
BI tools help determine readmission rates through health conditions and patient demographics. The data provided will help you decide which treatments you should focus on to prevent readmission cases.
Managing Medical Staff
Managing employees in a healthcare organization can be a real challenge. Each staff has different roles and working hours, from doctors, nurses, medical specialists, pharmacists, to porters. To ensure that the staff-to-patient ratio remains balanced, you have to organize information for all employees.
BI tools help you manage diverse employee groups by providing an in-depth view of day-to-day operations. The information will allow you to monitor and organize proper staff scheduling and determine whether each department is over-or understaffed. For example, if there is a low nurse-to-patient ratio, you can make staffing changes to meet demand.
Healthcare organizations often use complex strategies to manage their data resources, making it challenging to obtain the insights they need. With the use of business intelligence, it can positively impact all healthcare stakeholders by knowing when to provide the right treatment at the right time.
