Why Healthcare Providers Must Make Data-Driven Decisions ... And How to Sort Through the Data You Need

Making data-driven decisions in your business can be defined as the process that involves the use of data to inform the decisions you make and validate the next action before you even commit to it.

This is seen in different aspects of a business. For instance, you might collect responses from customers to identify things like the features, services, and products that the customers want.

A healthcare provider might use health records and the history of patients to determine a diagnosis and the kind of treatment to be administered to the patient. This shows how important data is to a business.

Data in the Healthcare Industry

Even though most industries and big companies are embracing analytics, most of them do not have a data-driven culture. The healthcare industry is one of the most information-intensive industries. In this industry, data plays an important role in the operational and organizational decision-making process. 

The industry has traditionally used and managed data through Electronic Health Records (EHR). However, most practitioners have not yet understood the EHR system well and are still struggling to find out about its clinical capabilities, processes, and workflows. 

Most of them lack the right planning, strategy, and vision on how they can use EHR systems to acquire data, analyze it, and use it for decision-making.

How to Sort Through the Data You Need

Before understanding how and why healthcare providers must make data-driven decisions, how can they sort through the data that they need?

Using Specialist Software to Run Reports

Healthcare providers using an EHR system can use an EHR reporting tool to sort through their patient data. These tools come with reporting and management features that allow them to analyze huge amounts of data within minutes.

Using the analyzed and sorted data, they can evaluate their performance, measure outcomes, and make decisions that help them achieve their expectations. These tools come with reporting templates and allow users to create custom reports and export data in different formats for easier access.

But how and why should healthcare providers make data-driven decisions?

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics involves the use of historic and current data to build a predictive behavior model. Healthcare providers can use different techniques, such as data queries, machine learning, and statistical analysis to predict the occurrence of an event.

They need predictive analysis when making decisions about patient treatment and patient data management. They can use the data collected through their EHR systems to identify the right treatment for their patients, prevent their deterioration, and estimate the risks of heart diseases.

In addition, the EHR systems are effective when it comes to collecting and managing patient data. They are, unfortunately, difficult to use for most healthcare providers. This is because they come with a lot of information including billing and clinical information. That notwithstanding, EHR systems provide staffers with easy access to information to aid decision-making.

Diagnostic Analytics

Healthcare providers also use data collected and stored in different platforms such as the EHR system for diagnostic analytics. They can understand why something happened and then make a decision on the way forward.

Diagnostics analytics can also be used to understand why a healthcare provider got the kind of results it got in a certain aspect of its operations. For example, diagnostic analysis can be used to understand why a certain illness is affecting more people at a certain time of the year.

In addition, healthcare executives, administrators, and clinicians can use diagnostic analytics from their EHR machines to understand different challenges in the medical field. Together with artificial intelligence (AI), they can analyze EHR data more quickly than they could manually, and make decisions from the analyzed data.

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics can be used to describe clients’ or customers’ behavior in a business. In this case, healthcare providers can use descriptive analytics to describe the behavior of their patients.

It is composed of past patient data stored in the EHR systems. This data might include things like patient outcomes, treatments, surgeries, prescriptions, geographical data, and billing and payments, among others.

Using this data, healthcare providers can understand their patients’ behavior. This is important when it comes to making decisions for the success of their operations. For example, they can use past patient data to predict risks for common diseases and make decisions on preventive care.

In conclusion, data is one of the most important assets for any organization. However, if the organization does not use the data effectively especially when it comes to decision-making, then the data does not help it in any way.