The health care industry is undergoing a significant transformation. Current economic conditions have challenged health care organizations with compromised cash flow, reduced resources, and declining margins.

Today, health care organizations are re-examining how the mountains of information at their fingertips can be better used to nurture future growth in the face of this economic uncertainty, and drive high-quality care.

How can we provide safer, more cost-effective care to patients? What's the financial payoff for quicker recoveries and shorter hospital stays? What's the right mix of services at a location that ensures optimal care? For these and many other questions, health care organizations need timely access to critical data about how well their institution, market, competitors and suppliers are performing now, and moving forward.

Organizations are turning to business analytics, a key piece of any health care system. Business analytics, both historical and predictive, ensures that real-time health information reaches the right people, at the right time, so they can better monitor performance, detect trends, improve decisions and deliver more efficient patient care. 

Finding the opportunities

In times of change, decision-makers need to understand how an organization is performing against its targets. Hospital administrators and health care professionals do not have the time to sift through stacks of reports to find out what's right -- or wrong.

By linking individual and team performance to organizational goals, analytic capabilities can help users understand how their roles drive institutional performance. Scorecards and dashboards, for instance, can provide managers a dynamic view of current levels of service, and what they need to do to improve delivery processes.

Taken together, those tools help health care providers and administrators respond quickly to concise information they receive at a glance. Key decision-makers can quickly spot delivery trends, which in turn can better support critical quality initiatives. 

Health care facilities are always looking to shore up internal operations to ensure the entire organization is running at peak efficiency. This requires an in-depth understanding of how well the organization is operating relative to its historical trends, its peers and the overall market.

Just like when a monitor goes off announcing a rise in a patient's blood pressure, analytics can trigger quick responses to the business side of health care. Rather than measuring performance in absolutes, decision-makers can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to gain a bigger picture of organizational efficiency. Rather than single-point measures, such as patients per month or revenues per service line, administrators can track performance relative to market growth, strategic objectives or peer groups.

Management gains the context they need for key decisions, such as rebalancing the organization's service mix, increasing profitability across facilities, and improving patient throughput processes.

Making the tough calls

As cash reserves decline, health care organizations must make difficult decisions on allocating resources and prioritizing initiatives.

Through detailed business analytics, decision-makers can assess how results change over time, in different locations and across various service categories. By drilling down to transaction-level detail, or comparing performance for a particular time period, they can spot trends to better understand resource requirements and plan accordingly.

In practical terms, this level of insight makes it easier to determine which resources, initiatives, locations or services may no longer be sustainable. At the same time, it allows decision-makers to target marketing efforts, roll out new service lines, and improve productivity by streamlining workflow and eliminating inefficient processes.

To keep expenses in check, health care providers need to effectively manage the workforce on every shift. Understanding the service requirements at each location and time of day, and ensuring the proper balance of clinicians and support personnel is essential to providing high-quality and cost-efficient patient care.

Business analytics helps health care organizations identify and mitigate the potential for unforeseen shifts in volumes, resources, contracts and quality measures; it can also identify areas where cash may be unnecessarily tied up in working capital, freeing up resources for more productive deployment.

A foundation for growth

While health care organizations cut costs, improve efficiencies and reallocate resources, they must also plan for future growth.