Living With Big Data: A 360° View Of Patients
By Krishnan Aghoramurthy, Director of Product Management, Evariant
The digital revolution in healthcare is well under way. As physicians have been more apt to use electronic medical records (EMRs) and pharma companies and medical researchers are now using electronic databases to hold and protect their data, healthcare holds and manages some of the most complex and contextually rich data sets of any industry. However, using that data to its fullest capacity to make intelligent clinical decisions at the point of care continues to be a pain point facing hospitals and health systems.
A recent McKinsey analysis on the future of marketing and sales through Big Data revealed companies who put data at the center of decision making can improve their marketing return on investment by 15-20 percent — adding up to $150 to $200 billion of additional value based on global annual marketing spend of an estimated $1 trillion.
In healthcare, hospitals and health systems access data to receive an all-encompassing, 360-degree view of their patients, providing personal medical history, family history, and other key insights that allow them to make informed decisions to not only better the patient’s experience but offer greater opportunities for improved outcomes. Having this advanced knowledge also enables the hospital or health system to be more streamlined and profitable.
On the broader patient spectrum, Big Data has the ability to predict epidemics, cure diseases, improve patient’s quality of life, and identify opportunities for preventative care — but the current challenges facing Big Data remain in aggregating data sets and making sense of that data to drive timely actionable decisions.
Today, strict regulations, privacy requirements, and competitive pressures only make the problem of optimizing data more difficult to address. Something to keep in mind is that, when you’re looking at data, you’re looking at people. By bringing a 360-degree view of patients, physicians are better able to engage with individuals, creating a better experience, which ultimately allows hospitals and health systems to grow revenue.
To create a 360-degree patient view, hospitals and health systems need to be able to gain insight within and between all of the silos in their systems. In essence, their systems need to be able to talk to each other. Patients go through different phases of care, and as such, the information accumulated along the way must be properly deciphered and broken down for each care provider. The information from the patient-physician relationship must then be taken one step further.
A SearchBusinessAnalytics article discusses the opportunities for Big Data to provide hospitals and health systems with better marketing tactics, enhancing ROI, while simultaneously uncovering unique individual patient intelligence that will enable physicians to provide better patient outcomes — which is what will bring benefits to the healthcare industry, a resource that allows multiple users to profit.
Today, healthcare software providers have developed platforms that aggregate data and analytics across a variety of internal and external information systems. The result is the systems are able to retrieve, clean, synthesize, organize, optimize, and often automate that data for multiple purposes, including hospital and health system marketers, researchers, physicians, and even patients depending on what the data is needed for.
Some examples of how hospitals and health systems can benefit from using Big Data and analytics to provide a 360-degree view of patients include:
Executing Targeted Marketing Programs That Increase Service Line Revenues And ROI
From a marketing perspective, integrating demographic information, billing records, call center information, market intelligence, and clinical data with business intelligence and predictive modeling tools will allow providers to identify clinical propensities and channel preferences to create targeted, actionable, go-to-market plans to retain existing patients, acquire new patients, and improve marketing ROI.
Providing Quality Care Engagement Through Nurse Navigation
Using data to streamline nursing activity — medical information, administrative background, physician data, and workflow — in near-real time can help nurses navigate critically ill patients through the health system when they arrive for out-patient treatment. This approach improves both quality of care and patient customer satisfaction while allowing nurses to plan their day and manage multiple patients.
Enabling Quality Care Engagement Through Discharge Calling
With increasing penalties for patient readmissions, ensuring patients understand their post-discharge care plan is a crucial step for hospitals and health systems to take. By combining medical data, CRM data, and workflow, data used for discharge follow-up will guarantee each patient receives appropriate follow-up messages and reminders about their specific care plan once they leave the hospital.
The opportunities Big Data and analytics open up for the healthcare industry are significant. More importantly, with data enabling providers to get a 360-degree view of their patients the road to better health outcomes improves significantly.
About The Author
Krishnan Aghoramurthy is a Director of Product Management at Evariant and is responsible for the Healthcare Data Hub: Evariant’s Big Data streaming analytics engine. Krishnan has over 25 years of experience in technology product management and business development in a range of product areas including supercomputers, software, IT infrastructure and semiconductors. For the last 10 years, Krishnan has been focused on healthcare technology working on product lines ranging from revenue cycle management, to healthcare data analytics, and 3D bioprinting.