Healthcare business intelligence involves analyzing business performance metrics in order to improve operations, with a focus on understanding the relationship between clinical quality and profitability. This data can be used to target areas for cost reduction without sacrificing patient care, such as food service operations and equipment layout.
Healthcare business intelligence includes data about a healthcare provider’s business activities. This data includes business performance metrics typical of other business operations. You can analyze the marketing metrics, financial performance, and manufacturing efficiency of a healthcare enterprise. This is done in order to improve business operations. What distinguishes healthcare business intelligence is the effort to understand the ways in which clinical quality and profitability are related.
Collecting business data about health care typically involves deciding what data is needed; how the data will be collected, stored and accessed; and what the desired result should ideally be in using the data. By taking the intelligence and insights gained from data, managers can look to apply it to low-hanging fruit first. This includes those operational aspects that are perceived as the most expensive and easiest to change.
This focused approach not only yields a reasonably quick and rewarding return on investment (ROI), but often allows a lean mindset to permeate day-to-day healthcare operations. Additionally, information gleaned from patient satisfaction surveys could be used in an effort to target those areas that are most likely to negatively impact customer opinion. For example, a relatively small change in staff behavior, such as an intentional friendly greeting offered to patients, can have a large impact on repeat elective surgery.
One common motivation for collecting and quantifying healthcare business intelligence is to find ways to control costs without sacrificing the quality of patient care. Cultural and legal sanctions prevent healthcare providers from adopting other common cost-cutting strategies, such as extensive staff reductions. The replacement of expensive life support machinery with much less effective, albeit cheaper, machinery would likely be considered completely unacceptable by patients and staff. However, cost-containment measures can include using the data collected to make strategic decisions to reduce waste without measurably impacting essential patient care.
For example, food service operations within a hospital may include an employee’s cafeteria as well as food served to patients who must meet special dietary needs. By using healthcare business intelligence to measure the leanness of food production in a hospital, food costs can be reduced significantly. Some hospitals have instituted waste control measures such as measuring food discarded and reducing the amount of food purchased based on those calculations. In this way certain areas can be targeted to reduce expenses without negatively impacting patient care.
Reformatting equipment layout and staff placement can reduce unnecessary steps in a healthcare operation. In a large healthcare organization, reducing the collective steps taken in the performance of functions can lead to a better quality of healthcare without increasing personnel expenses. Customer satisfaction is improved while costs are reduced due to healthcare business intelligence.
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