The Business Intelligence Blog

Let’s take a step back for a moment to see the trend in performance measurement in healthcare. Most quality measurements on the clinical side of healthcare deal with the inputs to care. For instance, HEDIS measures such as weight assessment and counseling for nutrition and physical activity for children and adolescents, well-child exams, childhood immunizations, breast cancer screening, cholesterol management for patients with cardiovascular condition, etc. measure the actions taken by healthcare providers to improve health. Joint Commission measures also evaluate the inputs leading to healthy outcomes. Readmission rates are an example of measurements of the results of those actions in terms of whether the inputs worked the first time. Analysis of these results will lead to further analysis of the inputs that led to a readmission, or better yet, to the inputs that prevented a readmission.

This means that clinical performance measurement will come full circle. In doing so, clinical performance measurement will mirror financial performance measurement. No business would have its financial analysts measure investments or operational activity without evaluating them in terms of the results on the bottom line. Nor would that business simply report the financial results without a thorough analysis of the causes for those results. We take this for granted in financial management. We will now be seeing more of this cause and effect analysis in clinical performance management as well.

Interesting post by Scott Wanless in B-Eye Network.

Over at The Health Care Blog, Deb Bradley, Vice President, Client Solutions at Verisk Health in Waltham, Massachusetts writes about some examples of the next generation healthcare analytics. Most of us who do analytics engineering as apart of our day jobs would agree, healthcare is on area where analytics should grow vastly. There is a lot of data that can be intelligently massaged to answer some of the most challeging health related questions.

Medical claims, pharmacy claims, lab values, HRAs, genetic markers, biometrics – the abundance of data is having an immediate impact on how analytics shape healthcare. Next generation analytics are bringing attention to health and wellness rather than disease-specific guidelines, and generating novel approaches to value-based medicine and care management.

Traditionally, analytics, such as predictive modeling, have been used to identify individuals for chronic care management and to set rates. New predictive models, however, include financial and clinical algorithms, which allow healthcare organizations to implement advanced ways to identify, manage and measure risk across and within a population.

Some progress on the healthcare BI Apps. Read more from dBusiness News.

In the newly released benchmark report “Business Intelligence in Healthcare: Have Providers Found a Cure?,” Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company , found that Best-in-Class organizations achieved a 15% increase in patient satisfaction scores through the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and analytical tools. This study collected data from nearly 100 healthcare providers and found that these organizations are increasingly deploying BI tools in the hospital in order to combat the challenges of rising healthcare costs and the pressing need to enhance patient care.

Prior Aberdeen research revealed that healthcare organizations have been hesitant to deploy analytical tools, lagging behind industry norms in both adoption and maturity of BI implementations. The challenge many hospitals face is making sense of a tangled web of disparate back-end data sources. Showing a lucid connection between analytical capability and enhanced quality of care is often a complicated task. Through the use of BI and analytical tools, healthcare organizations have been able to leverage financial and clinical data in order to better manage patient flow, streamline their operations, and deliver an elevated standard of patient care. Best-in-Class organizations have been able to achieve these performance improvements through an efficient combination of organizational capability and technology enablers such as HIS (Hospital Information Systems). Drawing on a solid foundation of organizational capability the Best-in-Class were able to drive an 11% reduction in overtime incurred, a stark contrast to all other organizations that experienced a 7% increase in overtime incurred.

An enormous flow of data is generated from patient encounters on a daily basis, and those who promote business intelligence believe this data can become useful information with the help of “BI” tools. Not just any information, but information that can help hospitals derive added value from their IT investments by sharpening their decision-making on both the business and clinical sides.

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GHC-SCW, the first Madison health organization to deploy an electronic medical record, is turning its attention to the reporting mechanisms of EMRs, which serve as the foundation for business intelligence in healthcare.

John HansmannFor inspiration, Metz can turn to John Hansmann, a regional manager for Intermountain Healthcare. Intermountain is a Utah-based nonprofit organization that has used analytics for its clinical operations.

Hansmann, who spoke at WTN’s annual Digital Healthcare Conference, defined business intelligence as the use of data to help make better business operational decisions, “whether it’s financial or clinical.”

While the argument continues, my two cents is that Business Intelligence can certainly help any vertical to a large extent provided its been deployed and utilised effectively.