In today’s ever-changing world, hospitals are a source of constant energy, fast-paced decision-making, and data generation. Naturally, with the help of technology, these concepts become a bit more manageable compared to the archaic ways of yesteryear.
However, just imagine how much more organized, deliberate, and quick these processes can become with the help of data analytics. Well, if your imagination fails to paint you this picture, let us do it through this article. We’ll show you how improving the three most common areas – patients, services, and healthcare professionals – can lead to a significant performance boost for your hospital. So, without further ado, let’s begin!
Three approaches, three improvements
Patient data
Since patient care is essential for any hospital, we’d be amiss if we didn’t start here. After all, collecting and organizing your patient data is vital for optimizing a hospital’s internal processes. Having an app to better visualize how many patients your hospital has or what’s troubling each one is probably something you’ve seen a lot in the past.
However, by utilizing all the data your hospital gathers daily, and with the help of advanced analytics, you can have a tool that can help your doctors better organize their tasks for the day.
How would that go, you may ask? Well, by collecting data for a patient’s condition, symptoms, medical history, etc., you could naturally do a thorough examination and even make head-to-head comparisons to better prioritize patient treatment. But a doctor’s work is more fast-paced now than it’s ever been, and taking the time to examine things and make a decision could end up costing some precious time.
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“Creating a scoring system that takes into consideration all the available data and presents a severity rank can really help speed those key decisions along.”
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It’s worth noting that the scoring factors need to be modifiable because new advancements are constantly being made, and factors that might seem severe at this time could be just a nuisance in the future.
This approach can be employed by doctors to better prepare for board meetings as well. And it could even be extended to rank the healthcare professionals within the hospital itself, based on treatments success levels, number of patients, complaint frequency, etc. So, that leads us to the next approach that could lead to improved processes – optimizing the hospital’s services.
Service data
Hospitals usually have a variety of therapies, surgeries, or treatments they can perform for a number of illnesses. With the real-time data gathered around those services, hospitals can get a genuine picture of their respective success and failure rates. With that information, decisions and recommendations of the successful procedures can be used to improve the rest of the services.
Additionally, further research and funds can be dedicated to improving specific areas of the hospital’s resources. Once again, a proper app can make recording, tracking, and managing all this data a smooth experience.
So, what makes this hypothetical app better than your current method of recording and reviewing? Well, first off, many hospitals still use some kind of EHR system along with Excel to store and pass around data. However, having that same data collected and visualized in one easy-to-access place can provide a holistic overview of all activities at hand.
These analytics don’t have to necessarily be a completely new system, rather they can be embedded right into your current EHR system and allow your medical professionals to stay within the comfort of the familiar.
Furthermore, with data analytics on your side, your hospital could investigate the occurrence of complications within patients and what led to them. The generated insights could then showcase potential improvements in either the service, the treatment selection process, or even the equipment choice. Additionally, recording and comparing procedure durations can also help your personnel better prepare and plan for future therapies or surgeries.
Imagine getting detailed insights into each element of your services – from medical device handling between doctors and nurses to the procedure itself to the comments or complaints made by the patients afterward.
Not only that but knowing more details about the performance history of specific healthcare professionals is an essential part as well. So, as a final approach, let’s look into improving a hospital’s performance by optimizing their employee data.
Employee data
Acquiring new equipment tends to lead to mass training among your medical center’s doctors and nurses. However, the certification process most often isn’t instantaneous, and checking the progress of every employee is a very time-consuming activity.
In these training cases, hospitals often need to know if their doctors are in the middle of a certification process, what kind of license they’re going for, or even when their last training session was. Checking how many doctors or nurses in your hospital are certified to use specific medical devices or perform certain treatments is great, but also inspecting how many others are utilizing those same services without a certificate is even more crucial. Of course, these situations can occur, and filling out reasons can at times save you much stress.
We can even go a step beyond the quick checks and dive into more details like examining the scheduled training sessions and how many healthcare professionals have attended each. Highlighting the attendance rate can give you a better idea of your hospital’s certification rate and can give you actionable insights into your doctors’ performance.
Additionally, suppose the license or certificate has an expiration date. In that case, you can easily track it and get notifications when it is nearing that end date and thus follow up with the certified employee about renewing it if necessary.
Conclusion
Naturally, these are some of the ways you can use data analytics and business intelligence to optimize a hospital’s operations. Much of the data collection and output generation processes can be automated, for example with on-demand reporting or even with daily reports in a preferred format. Still, we hope you managed to get a good idea of the opportunities and benefits data analytics can bring to your hospital.
The solutions presented above can be approached as separate projects, or they can also be combined into a bigger-scope project. Having these three essential parts of the optimization roadmap in a single dashboard provides a more in-depth overview of the hospital’s performance.
Furthermore, the ideas presented here cover very general cases that are commonly observed within other hospitals. So, if you’d like to get a more personalized solution, then be sure to contact us, and we’ll schedule a call at your earliest convenience.
