Analytics Are Nothing Without Action

Although the investment in health IT innovations continue to rise, with 56 percent of providers investing in IT this year, there still remains a disconnect on how to best leverage the data and insights that organizations have at their disposal. With a new healthcare economy focused on value, provider consolidation, consumers and changing reimbursement models, healthcare organizations need a holistic, enterprise-wide view of their business. They also need valuable data insights to tap into cost savings opportunities.

In this week's post, we continue to offer best practices that healthcare organizations can utilize to make the most of their analytics’ investments and turn those insights into action. Here are three key strategies that can make a significant impact on an organization’s financial health:

• Offer Self-Service Access to Business Users: In many cases, organizations have invested in creating an enterprise data warehouse, but the adoption of the platform is often delayed due to IT bottlenecks in reporting and analysis. By empowering business users with the ability to perform their own analysis to identify the root causes of trends, the speed from insight to action will increase.

• Find New Value in Existing Claims and Billing Data: Most data warehouses focus on aggregating clinical data from EMRs, but many healthcare organizations fail to recognize the potential in claims and billing data. Most data models are built on this type of data, so their value should not be underestimated. Organizations should also recognize that most risk models and clinical measures, including CMS quality measures and HEDIS measures, are based largely on this data. By using this insight, organizations can better prepare for the changing risk models and clinical measures.

• Learn to Work with Payer Data: As new payment models blur the lines between providers and payers, leveraging payer data has never been so important. By creating a data infrastructure and training your staff to manage and analyze payer data, organizations can develop analytics for utilization measures and per member per month (PMPM) cost. These insights can help support new business models and uncover nuances to create added value across the enterprise.

  To obtain more strategies, check out our latest whitepaper, Harnessing Enterprise Data Analytics for the New Healthcare Economy, here.  Learn more about integrated analytics for the healthcare enterprise here.