Things have changed quickly and dramatically in the healthcare industry – by necessity. The Affordable Care Act has allowed millions of Americans to gain health insurance. Global health initiatives are also improving health and raising the bar for healthcare around the world. The advent of new business models, like the Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and multiple reimbursements models, and the imperative to enable population health management is transforming healthcare, particularly in the United States, at an unprecedented rate. It is anticipated that the pace of transformation will be accelerated in other parts of the world, once the United States develops an accountable care model that is best practice, mature, and scalable.
These changes have taken place concurrently with the advent of Big Data. Every company in every field has bigger data challenges than ever before, but no field has needs quite as pressing as healthcare. Would you want your doctor to have out-of-date data on the latest treatment for your condition? Would you want your nurse to have to wait a week to find information pertinent to your care? Would you like health administrators to work with slow, ponderous, hard-to-understand tools when allocating resources and making decisions that affect your care? Anyone would have to answer an emphatic “NO!” to all of the above.
The data challenges in medicine are not one-dimensional. Data warehousing is one challenge, and it’s a huge one: Finding the best places and ways to store data is an essential step. But that’s just the half of it – and maybe not that much. All the data in the world isn’t worth much if you’re not able to understand and use it to improve care. Getting on top of data analysis is a major challenge for healthcare organizations – and it’s necessary to empower physicians, nurses, and clinicians with the actionable insights needed to achieve high-quality care.
Given these challenges, visionary leaders in the healthcare industry are embracing self-service data discovery and visual analytics solutions that allow everyone in an organization that needs the data to access it, while maintaining patient privacy. Equally critical for healthcare providers in the era of value-based care is ensuring the best possible patient experience from door to discharge and beyond, to reduce 30-day readmission rates, as well as the penalties and fines for non-compliance. Here are three ways healthcare organizations are changing their approach to data for the better.
Easy, self-service data analysis becomes the norm
Like other businesses, healthcare organizations used to be at the mercy of the IT department. If information was needed, you had to ask for a report. Sometimes, this would take days, weeks, or even months. This has never been a good system in healthcare, for obvious reasons. Now there’s no need to go to an IT department when looking for data because software allows everyone access. Self-service analytics makes everyone a data consumer and analyst, including surgeons, nurses, hospital administrators, and anyone else in healthcare who wants their decisions to be driven by real data.
For example, Stanley Healthcare – which helps clients track and manage assets to increase productivity and lower costs – has been a strong adopter of new technology, integrating their Mobileview software with data analytics and visualization software. For Stanley, their data is linked to one of the oldest and least advanced medical tools: the tags on patients. Far from being a simple wristband, these tags are now “smart” – they’re part of Stanley’s real-time location system (RTLS). These tags are packed with information on when a patient entered a clinic or hospital, why they’re there, what nurses have seen them, what medicines they need, etc. The information provided on the tag is accessible to the people involved with the patient’s direct care – in other words, the people who need that information the most.
Such changes are being embraced across the medical world. For example, St. George’s Healthcare NHS Trust in London was dealing with a perpetually overcrowded emergency room. Once they started using an “Arrivals” dashboard with visual analytics capabilities, it was easy to see when patients checked in and with what conditions. This quickly led to the insight that stroke activity was responsible for the patient overload. This in turn allowed for better allocation of services and, ultimately, better emergency care. The dashboard isn’t hidden away with IT or up in an ivory tower with administration; it’s right there in the emergency room easily accessible to the staffers who need it, including nurses, residents, and med students.
Patients are now in the data loop too. A nurse or doctor can easily show a patient data pertinent to their care. For example, a dashboard showing their weight fluctuations correlated with a health condition could help a patient understand why losing weight has been more difficult. A dashboard showing the overall risks of smoking or drinking is a powerful way to communicate a health warning to patients. Doctors and patients have always had communication problems, but those problems can be significantly alleviated when the relevant facts are accessible and sharable.
Powerful visuals tell a story
Data, unfortunately, doesn’t speak for itself. That’s where data visualization software comes in. Such software is designed with the human visual system in mind; it’s tailored to our strengths and weaknesses. Visualizing data effectively is crucial in the medical field, where a doctor doesn’t have time to puzzle through rows of data or become an expert at pivot tables. The data should speak loudly and clearly through visuals, graphs, images, colors, and fonts that are easy to understand.
Data visualization is also making a difference at Piedmont Healthcare in Georgia, where there are 400 staff members, 1,200 affiliated doctors, and thousands of patients throughout northern Georgia. They have always had data challenges, but those challenges multiplied with the advent of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Greater speed in reporting was needed, and part of how that speed is achieved is through the power of visuals. The streamlining has been dramatic. For example, according to Piedmont’s Business Intelligence Manager Mark Jackson, huge reams of reports have been replaced with simple dashboards. In one case, 2,400 Excel speadsheets printed and bound in a 133-page volume for hospital presidents were replaced with a single unified dashboard. That kind of data synthesis is exactly what medical professionals need when time is of the essence – which it always is in medicine. The impact has been dramatic: $2 million in savings from avoidable physician consulting services, 30-day readmission rates for heart attacks and heart failure reduced by 12 percent and 10 percent respectively, with a 23 percent improvement in IT analyst efficiency delivering $650,000 in annual savings.
Back at Stanley Healthcare, such visuals are also used in very practical ways: to locate, assess, and relocate equipment. No healthcare facility or system has an infinite number of assets. Key equipment needs to be in the right place and easy to move when necessary, whether that trip is up the elevator or across town. Dashboards allow staff to track the location and status of equipment to make sure it’s in the right place and in a state of cleanliness and readiness as needed. The clarity of visual analytics allows nurses and technicians to find and allocate the necessary drugs, devices, and consumables needed to ensure proper care in an efficient manner.
Doctors aren’t just looking at X-rays and test results anymore: data visualizations are now a big part of how doctors observe and improve patient health. Next-generation analytics created for the business user is directly improving healthcare for thousands of people.
Speed is omnipresent – and leads directly to action
So much of the healthcare industry is about speed. How soon can you see a doctor? Can the proper care be administered in time? Will I make a speedy recovery? But speed is about more than just what happens in the emergency room or doctor’s office. If a healthcare provider is buried in paperwork and can’t keep up with data, everything in the organization is going to be out of date, inefficient, and potentially dangerous to patients.
Beneficiaries of such tools include the doctors at the Texas Institute for Robotic Surgery, which has long been on the cutting edge of technology in the operating room. Now they’re being just as innovative with data. The amount of data is stunning. With over 30,000 procedures a year, there are countless ways to look at those procedures. You can look at individual patients, doctor, nurse, equipment, time of day, location information, and more. This allows for insights that would not be possible otherwise, as normally imperceptible trends can jump out when you have the right tools. Using visual analytics tools and a data warehouse enables them to harness and analyze data in weeks that would otherwise have taken years, according to Dr. Randy Fagin, Vice President, Texas Institute of Robotic Surgery.
This speed is contagious. Using Stanley Healthcare as an example, the speed of data analysis software is leveraged to help other areas that need to pick up the pace – particularly when it comes to workflow inefficiencies. By linking data discovery software with their previous systems, it’s easier to identify and resolve logjams in many areas. When data analysis isn’t a time-consuming chore, you can mine its insights quickly and put them into action – which is the important part. Speed is useless unless it gets healthcare workers to actionable data faster.
Healthy data = healthy patients
When it comes to their care, patients have always wanted the best doctors and up-to-date medical equipment. Increasingly, they’re going to demand healthcare with the most cutting-edge data analysis too. At Stanley Healthcare and other organizations, data analytics is saving months of work while putting data in front of just about anyone who needs it, including patients. Better data analysis is paying off for those patients – in better outcomes at a lower cost.
