The Business Intelligence Blog

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.