Here’s some stats from Oracle regarding productive use of data which I’d guess are if anything understated. The database giant’s new study has concluded that healthcare providers lose $70.2 million per year, or 15 percent of additional revenue per hospital, because they’re not able to take full advantage of the data they already have.
To draw this conclusion, Oracle surveyed 333 C-level executives at enterprises cutting across 11 industries, 30 of which were healthcare-related businesses. All of the execs across the industries said they were collecting and managing more data than they were two years ago. The average increase was a hefty 85 percent. (My bet is that healthcare numbers, if isolated, would be even higher.)
Forty-seven percent of healthcare execs told Oracle that their organization couldn’t do much to generate actionable insight from the flood of new data. Worse, 40 percent said their current systems simply weren’t up to the job, reports Information Week.
To address the problem, 50 percent of healthcare execs are implementing standard tools for BI analysis, while 47 percent are looking into customized systems and applications.
Of course, Oracle has a vested interest in claiming we’re all yahoos when it comes to business intelligence, since they want you to buy their BI products. But that being said, it’s hard to argue that potentially actionable data is slipping through hospitals’ fingers; there’s simply too much new data coming in through EMRs, if nothing else.
Small wonder, then, that hospitals are hot to improve their BI capabilities. According to a recent KLAS study (see bottom of this page), 50 percent of healthcare organizations surveyed plan to buy or replace new BI systems over the next three years. One-third said they were buying new BI tools and 19 percent are replacing BI systems.
According to the Information Week piece on the subject, hospitals are most interested in 1) enterprise analytics; 2) predictive analytics; 3) ACO analytics; 4) healthcare data integration/data warehousing; and 5) population health. But I think we’re looking at five years at least before hospitals really get their arms around any of these, other than perhaps analytics within their own house.
