You pull up to your doctor’s office, ready to queue up and answer a legion of questions about your health, but before you get a complete sentence out, the receptionist has your entire medical history at her fingertips. How? Hospital business intelligence leverages BI tools to document patient records, improve medical processes and offer guidance.
This Article Covers:
What Is Hospital Business Intelligence?
Healthcare organizations adopt business intelligence and reporting tools to facilitate data-driven insights and boost patient care. These solutions evaluate different metrics, including patient diagnosis, wait time, safety, readmission rates and more. They centralize patient data for analysis and report sharing across departments to improve collaboration.
Create reports and dashboards using data from different sources, including surveys and questionnaires, various EHR systems and other sources to improve outcomes, boost profits and offer a seamless patient experience.
Hospital business intelligence can:
- Plan treatments based on symptoms.
- Schedule staff in sync with patient volumes.
- Identify patients who need follow-up care.
- Analyze readmission rates.
- Offer quick access to patient records.
- Prescribe safe and reliable medications for patients with chronic diseases.
- Make healthcare convenient and affordable.
- Reduce costs.
- Provide improved healthcare capabilities.
Primary Benefits
Let’s look at the benefits of hospital business intelligence:
Optimize Patient Stays
Optimize patient stays while making the most of the available space. Releasing patients too soon can result in medical complications, while keeping them for too long may negatively affect efficiency. BI tools determine targeted stays with respect to recovery times for specific ailments.
Track Patient Outcomes
Determine if treatment is successful while evaluating and modifying practices. However, obtaining legitimate data from patients is difficult. Some may prefer to recover from home and avoid contacting their providers, even if they experience complications.
You can use surveys and phone calls to collect relevant data and gauge treatment success in these cases. Create healthcare reports to depict successful therapies and use these insights to enhance treatments, improve drug efficacy and inform staffing decisions.
Manage Staff
Manage hospital staff with different roles and work hours while streamlining employee information to optimize staff-patient ratios. BI tools depict information about diverse employee groups to offer a comprehensive view of operations. They allow you to strengthen resource scheduling and make strategic changes.
Reduce Wait Times
Wait times are a major complaint when it comes to medical institutions. Hospitals have limited resources to deal with massive influxes of patients. It’s vital to expedite the process to mitigate waiting times and boost the patient experience.
Collect wait time data through EHR systems and automate the process via sensors. Manage appointments in a timely manner to ensure patient satisfaction and avoid treatment delays. Create robust reports to track wait times and optimize schedules.
Business intelligence solutions show wait trends and patterns throughout the day or week. You can use this information to make accurate predictions and address demand effectively.
Analyze Treatment Costs
You need to keep expenses and maintenance costs low while offering excellent health care services. Leverage BI tools to analyze treatment costs across various health conditions and age groups. If the actual cost exceeds predictions, you can drill down into the data to find out why.
Speed Up Billing and Claims Processes
Collect receivables, submit claims to insurance agencies and cater to those unable to make timely payments.
BI offers a comprehensive view of healthcare metrics and KPIs, including average claim processing time, claim denial rate, cost per claim and more. Insights can reveal which insurance companies reject certain claim types or if they take too long to process requests. You can take precautionary steps to resolve these issues with insurance companies to ensure customer satisfaction.
Applications
Patient Care
Determine appropriate treatments based on diagnoses. For instance, analyzing and documenting patients’ history alongside current treatment plans can alert caregivers about possible prescription issues.
BI platforms let patients access portals and dashboards to fill out paperwork, view billing information and schedule appointments.
Resource Allocation
Properly allocating resources fosters patient care, mitigates readmission rates and cuts costs. Employ data modeling and visualization capabilities to address risks, discover plausible solutions and make accurate forecasts.
For example, in the event of an epidemic, it’s possible to leverage BI tools to predict infection rates while allocating beds and infrastructure.
Patient Personalization
With BI in the picture, patient data is easily accessible. You can view patient histories, prescribed medications and treatments on a dashboard. Patients can schedule appointments, chat with their doctors, view bills and make payments online.
A portal showing a patient’s diagnosis, medication and appointment history.
Doctors can diagnose symptoms and prescribe medicines on the app, and patients can access personalized care from the comfort of home.
Claims Management
Screen and monitor cases to obtain health insurance or medical coverage. Filter fraudulent cases to offer feasible treatment costs.
Remote Monitoring
Through remote patient monitoring, sensors can remotely send vitals like heart rate, weight, blood pressure levels and more to healthcare practitioners. It ensures quality treatments while mitigating hospital admission and readmission rates.
Data empowers healthcare providers to recommend treatments or offer wellness advice. For instance, if the patient isn’t responding to prescribed medicines, a doctor may suggest alternatives.
Conclusion
Advanced technologies like predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence are disrupting the healthcare industry. Hospital business intelligence leverages these cutting-edge tools to enhance patient care, ensure optimum labor distribution and boost clinical processes.
How has hospital business intelligence benefited you? Let us know with a comment below!