As the American healthcare industry continues to grow, providers have begun to search for a way to reduce burgeoning costs, and simultaneously improve the quality of services offered to patients. In the past, individual doctors and practices would be forced to do this work on their own, and their findings would be isolated to their practices, or shared with a narrow group of peers and colleagues.
Now, with the rise of business intelligence (BI), healthcare providers can leverage massive data sets drawn from patients and practices all over the world, then use the information found within to optimize and improve their services while reducing costs and operating inefficiencies across the board.
With the growth of big data and other digital transformations within the healthcare industry, the next few years are set to be transformative. Let’s explore the potential changes that are coming, and learn how these improvements will affect not only individual healthcare practices and practitioners, but their patients as well.
The Growth of Business Intelligence in Healthcare
In the next three years, business intelligence in healthcare, also known as healthcare analytics, is set to grow into an industry worth over $50 billion. That’s a 28% increase in compound annual growth rate from 2019 when it was valued at $14 billion globally.
This growth is likely due to two factors: the rise of personalized medicine, and the rapidly increasing volume of data held by healthcare facilities. It’s estimated that healthcare data has grown at an astounding rate of 878% since 2016, with the average hospital hosting more than 8 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) of data as of 2018.
With so much data available, business intelligence applications and tools have made it possible to use this data to personalize the industry, offering individualized treatment plans and even preventative care that can improve disease outcomes, saving the healthcare industry anywhere from $70 billion to $450 billion annually.
Categories of Business Intelligence Applications in Healthcare
With the almost limitless growth potential, what BI applications can we expect to see as the primary drivers of this change in the year ahead?
Administrative and Operational Analytics
By assessing and automating operational and administrative tasks, BI applications can ensure greater efficiency in scheduling, resource management, and more.
Clinical Analytics
With so much patient data accessible for analysis, more personalized care and better decision-making can be expected across the healthcare industry.
Financial Analytics
With improvements in AI and machine learning tools that can analyze financial data, practices and facilities will be able to draw up more effective budgets, financial forecasts, and revenue models that can help them save money and use resources more effectively.
Population Health Analytics
As these BI tools and applications are utilized by a wider audience, more data is available that can improve patient outcomes across various populations. This may be able to help prevent future epidemics, and offer more insights into diseases that seem to disproportionately affect certain populations.
The Benefits of Business Intelligence in the Healthcare Industry
As healthcare providers and facilities are empowered with better business intelligence tools, what types of outcomes will we see becoming more and more prevalent?
Safer and More Secure Patient Data
By improving data stewardship, healthcare facilities can help ensure that their sensitive patient data is well-organized and protected. This makes it easier on administrative staffers, ensures data is organized and available for analysis and helps ensure regulatory compliance.
Improved Decision-Making
When doctors and administrators can reference a large, diverse data set as part of their decision-making process, it allows them to make more thoughtful, equitable, and efficient decisions that can improve outcomes for a greater number of patients.
Increased Cost Efficiency
By creating optimized and streamlined processes and policies based on data, healthcare providers can help increase cost efficiency across the board.
Which BI Tools are Most Useful to the Healthcare Industry?
There are a variety of BI tools that may be useful to your organization working within the healthcare industry. These tools can ensure you’re working with the best and most organized data set possible, setting you up to make better decisions and run with greater operational efficiency.
At Strategis, our experts are adept at working with different facilities and practitioners to ensure that they’re able to take advantage of the best healthcare BI software solutions available.
Get in touch today to learn what tools and services we can offer your organization.
