The Impact of Business Intelligence in Healthcare and 4 Tools to Leverage It

Healthcare business intelligence is a term that describes the tools you can use to gather data about your patients and business, look for trends over time, and gain insight into your business’s processes. Healthcare organizations can use data and analytical tools to improve operations, patient care, and financial performance, but to do so, they must choose the right ones. Here’s more on why healthcare business intelligence is important, how business intelligence tools can help, and how using these tools improves the quality of patient care.

What To Know About Healthcare Business Intelligence

Healthcare business intelligence involves using BI tools to look into an organization’s data and convert it into helpful insights. The data itself can range from patient data to details about day-to-day operations.

When this data is gathered and combined from multiple sources, it can be difficult for a human to comb over it all and come up with actionable insights. However, with artificial intelligence and BI tools, getting results from healthcare analytics is simpler. The aggregated data and answers you find within help you make data-driven decisions to power your operation.

3 Healthcare BI Benefits

Implementing BI in healthcare organizations comes with a range of benefits, including improved patient care, operational efficiency, and financial performance. Here’s a closer look at how BI tools help:

Enhanced Patient Care

One of the key reasons to use BI tools or a BI solution is because of the way the correct data can influence the patient experience. With business intelligence software, healthcare data can help you better understand what healthcare organizations can do to improve patient care. For example, doctors may be able to better identify patients at risk of developing illnesses based on data about a particular population, or data analytics might identify the best treatments for specific conditions based on past data and patient outcomes.

Patient care is further improved through preventative and follow-up care standards set by data. For instance, healthcare analytics may show that following up with patients at four and eight weeks encourages them to stay on their treatment plans or check in for a follow-up procedure they would otherwise skip.

The patient experience isn’t just what patients actually go through with medical providers. In the background, research and disease management are also bettered through enhanced data analytics. Deeper research aided by BI tools can help doctors know the right path for treatment and may help improve outcomes for patients overall.

Improved Operational Efficiency

Any business owner knows the importance of developing efficient operations. Within the healthcare industry, efficient operations are necessary to help keep costs low and ensure patients receive appropriate care.

With business intelligence software, healthcare organizations can learn more about the processes that are working for them and the processes that aren’t. They can get a better view of the competition and what it’s doing that’s successful. And, they can determine if there is something more they can do to improve the patient experience and maintain patient loyalty.

Enhanced Financial Performance

Cutting down on costs is necessary because of the tight margins in the healthcare industry. With business intelligence tools, companies can use the BI solution to look into all business data and identify ways to save money or reduce expenditures. For example, analytics might show when a hospital could cut down on the number of employees, allowing the hospital to save money during slow periods but increase the number of employees during peak times.

BI tools can also help prevent or reduce insurance fraud. With the right data analytics and processes in place, it’s possible to identify irregularities in patient billing, as well as other types of fraud.

3 Healthcare BI Tools

Today’s market has several healthcare BI tools. Here are three that you should consider when you’re looking to invest in a BI solution:

1. Tableau

Tableau is a data explanatory tool. It has a dashboard that is easy to read and understand, and it gathers important insights all into one place. It uses predictive analytics, which can help you improve revenue and balance your staffing, for example, based on past data.

2. Microsoft’s Power BI

Microsoft Power BI has an easy-to-use dashboard with immediate visual analytics. Power BI gathers all the most important data right on your dashboard, letting you see information such as sales, profits, and opportunities as soon as you log in. Additionally, it is known for its mobile interface, letting you check the latest information in or outside of the office.

3. Oracle BI

Oracle BI is also known as Oracle Healthcare Analytics. This tool combines cloud analytics with data science technologies to build AI applications. It uses evidence-based care models, which helps it reduce how much care costs and improves the patient experience. Oracle Analytics is a complete platform, and it uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to streamline productivity and make data-driven decisions simple.

3 Examples of Business Intelligence in Healthcare

Business intelligence software is used in many aspects of healthcare. Here are a few examples of how it’s making a difference for healthcare organizations looking to harness the best of data analytics.

Data-Driven Care Planning

At the core of all things healthcare are patients. Patients need to have quality experiences. Getting the right care soon enough can mean the difference between good health and reducing the impact of an illness or living with a disease, terminal illness, or other negative outcome.

Data-driven care planning has an important role in healthcare as a result. With data-driven insights, medical providers can understand more about the patient population and begin to take action to treat it accordingly. They can see information about current trends in patient health, risk factors among their patients, and even opportunities to step in and intervene.

But data-driven care planning can go much further than the doctor’s office. For instance, in clinical trials, effectively analyzing data helps determine the trial’s efficiency, how satisfied patients were with the trial, and what could change to improve patient outcomes during the next trial (or when the drug is released to the public).

Predictive Healthcare

Knowing what to expect isn’t always possible in healthcare, but with predictive analytics, understanding what’s coming is becoming a reality. Using business intelligence AI and machine learning, you can begin to understand the likelihood of different things happening.

For example, predictive AI might be able to look at a patient’s chart and know when they’re most likely to stop treatment. With that information, it could be possible to set up follow-up appointments or take additional steps to keep the patient on track.

Similarly, predictive healthcare analytics can help those in the healthcare industry understand how their organizations are impacted financially throughout the year. Users can then identify things like bottlenecks or ways to save money during slower times of the year, improving operational costs.

Accelerated Drug Discovery

Drug research and drug discovery are two examples of business intelligence in healthcare that make a major difference in medicine on the whole. With data from pharmaceutical, healthcare, and other resources, it’s possible to develop new treatments faster than in the past. Additionally, these new treatments may be more effective and have fewer side effects when they’re researched and created from large pools of patient and trial data.

Accelerated drug discovery is one of the greatest perks that BI solutions can provide. With aggregated data and support finding key insights, researchers can more quickly identify the drugs that work or could work among patients. And, the treatments can get highly specific, as it could be possible to see a patient’s entire genome, identify variants, and develop a treatment plan that works with their genetic makeup.

Staffing Optimization

Another great way to use BI in the healthcare industry is as a way to optimize your processes. In the office, a hospital setting, or any other medical environment, staffing can be difficult to manage. It can be tough to know how many people you need on call or in the office. Additionally, the number of staff members you need might vary by the time of day or time of year.

Business analytics tools can help you gain better insight into your staffing situation and analyze your staffing data to optimize your staffing levels. And, even better, these tools can help you balance your staff’s workload, which can help reduce burnout and keep your staff loyal to your company.

Improve the Patient Experience With Podium

Understanding your practice’s data is key to growing your business, improving revenue, and creating a better patient experience. Analytics in healthcare are rapidly growing in importance, but with that trend, there is also more data to analyze than ever before.

With Podium, you get the insights you need to improve the patient experience and your practice’s reputation. Use Podium to get new leads and keep your schedule full, so you can get more data to help improve your services. Watch a demo to see how Podium can help.