Data analytics can help you streamline almost any business practice, including many in the health industry, but how can you streamline the analytics themselves to give you better reports? There are some tips, tricks and tools you can use to streamline data analytics for your hospital, private practice or hospice care facility such as researching various software solutions and collaborating with your stakeholders. You can also streamline the reports you receive by applying your software tools to specific questions or tasks such as wait times, discharge concerns or management processes.
Research Solutions for Aggregation
The biggest way to streamline data analytics is to find the right data aggregation tools. These tools take data from multiple sources to combine for the analytics solutions to comb through and produce reports. The right tools will be able to draw from data sources you designate without losing track of the source or lineage of the information. It is important to find tools designed to work within the healthcare industry and draw from sources both inside your facility and within the whole industry.
Collaborate With Stakeholders for Analytical Criteria
Your analytics will only be as good at giving your insight into streamlining your facility processes as the criteria used to gather and analyze the data. The best way to ensure that you are getting the most accurate reports is to involve all the stakeholders in the planning stage. By collaborating on which criteria should be looked at, what sources to use for data and which reports will make the biggest impact, you can streamline the generation process and get more tailored information.
Evaluate Patient Experience
Patients have more choice in their medical care than they have in the past and evaluating their experiences to improve your hospital can be a good way to see where changes need to take place. For instance, data from customer surveys can help you pinpoint the highest wait times in your facility so you can use analytics to see how those areas can be better scheduled or streamlined. Looking beyond the medical, you can create data pools to examine services like parking, cafeteria and cleanliness to elevate patient experience.
Predict the Unexpected
Although you will not be able to accurately predict everything all the time, you can use analytics to identify things like which patients are the most likely to experience avoidable discharge delays, how many Emergency Department patients are likely to need transfer to an in-patient bed each day and much more. This can streamline how your hospital works by getting important information and prioritization of services to everyone in the chain and provide pinpointed analytics for your software solutions to perform each day. By looking at the unexpected, but avoidable, delays your facility faces and applying forecasting analytics to that data, you can create better forecasts and help staff prioritize daily tasks.
Change the Ways You Manage
One of the biggest benefits of incorporating technology and analytics in your business plan is that it can change the way you manage your facility for the better. Not only can you use these tools to streamline processes and forecast where staff and resources will be needed, you can work with developers to create new tools to help with patient records, billing, paperwork and much more. You can even use analytics to see which internal processes take the most time for staff to perform and find ways to incorporate technology to reduce this.
The Bottom Line
Big data can be harnessed in many ways to improve the ways that businesses function, market and profit in various industries. The medical industry is no exception with analytics and reports helping streamline everything from the amount of paperwork your staff does to how priority forecasting is developed. You can streamline the way your analytics works by focusing on good aggregation tools, collaboration with your stakeholders and by targeting both internal and external information sources. You can even work with software developers to create new tools and develop new data streams to further improve the system.
