Using Healthcare Analytics to Achieve Strong Financial Performance

Everyone is talking about analytics, but I’ve been looking for the solutions that take analytics and package it nicely. This is what I hoped for when I found this whitepaper called How Healthcare Providers Can Leverage Advanced Analytics to Achieve Strong Financial Performance. This is a goal that I think most of us in healthcare IT would like to achieve. We want healthcare providers to be able to leverage analytics to improve their business.

However, this illustration from the whitepaper shows exactly why we’re not seeing the results we want from our healthcare analytics efforts:
Advanced Analytics Impact on Healthcare

That’s a complex beast if I’ve ever seen one. Most providers I talk to want the results that this chart espouses, but they want it just to happen. They want all the back end processing of data to happen inside a black box and they just want to feed in data like they’ve always done and have the results spit out to them in a format they can use.

This is the challenge of the next century of healthcare IT. EHR is just the first step in the process of getting data. Now we have the hard work of turning that data into something more useful than the paper chart provided.

The whitepaper does suggest these three steps we need to take to get value from our analytics efforts:
1. Data capture, storage, and access
2. Big data and analytics
3. Cognitive computing

If you read the whitepaper they talk more about all three of these things. However, it’s very clear that most organizations are still at step 1 with only a few starting to dabble in step 2. Some might see this as frustrating or depressing. I see it as exciting since it means that the best uses of healthcare IT are still to come. However, we’re going to need these solutions to be packaged in a really easy to use package. Otherwise no one will adopt them.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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