Today, healthcare organizations are challenged by the pressure to reduce costs, improve patient coordination and outcomes, provide more care with fewer resources, and overall be more patient-centric. Yet at the same time, evidence is mounting that the industry is increasingly struggling to deal with entrenched inefficiencies and suboptimal clinical outcomes.  Building business analytics in healthcare can help these organizations harness “big data” to create actionable insights, set their future vision, improve patient outcomes, and reduce time to value.

In recent years, healthcare data reporting and analytics has gained traction as a way to gain insight and support decision making within healthcare systems.  Reporting and analytics are two separate sides of the same coin.  Reporting is the “process of compiling and organizing your data into visual, written, or spoken summaries;” analytics, on the other hand, “focuses on exploring and interpreting data or reports in order to glean valuable insight into why certain trends happened the way they did.”  Many health systems agree that reporting and analytics are absolutely necessary for their success, and yet fewer than half of these systems actually have an analytics strategy in place. With Healthie, you can track your business growth and performance. With detailed reporting and analytics, you’ll gain valuable insights into your business, try this feature for $0 by signing up for Healthie’s Free Starter Plan.

Benefits of Analytics For Healthcare

✨ Allows for data-based quality care

Tracking patient outcomes using healthcare data analytics from metrics, chart notes, and journals allow you not only to identify current trends within your clients but also to predict future outcomes and trends.  If you work with a specific patient population with similar health conditions, tracking past patient data can help you determine the best interventions to implement with your current patients.  

✨ Measure and evaluate KPIs

Key performance indicators, better known as KPIs, are “critical indicators of progress toward an intended result.”  Measuring KPIs in your business allows you to track the progress of certain areas of your business; they can vary based on the type of wellness business or organization you are a part of.  It is crucial for your business to monitor KPIs to evaluate your progress towards your organizational goals, and analytics reporting can help you do so in a simple and streamlined way.  

‍✨ Reconcile multiple platforms

As a healthcare professional, you may be using multiple platforms to manage your clients and business.  These could include an EHR, an insurance billing or payment software, scheduling software, and a client engagement suite.  Data analytics for healthcare can help you look at data across the board, combining information from all of these platforms to give you a complete picture of your business’ and clients’ performance.  

✨ Evaluate provider performance

Healthcare data analytics reporting can allow supervisors to monitor provider performance across an organization.  Measure data such as patient outcomes, appointment lengths, revenue generated, and patient satisfaction for individual providers.  You can then leverage this data to identify providers ready for a promotion or raise and on the other hand, identify providers who need extra training and support in their current position.  

Healthie’s practice management platform is designed to help wellness professionals manage their business and build relationships with clients. Click here to sign up for a free starter account.

How to Implement a Healthcare Data Analytics Strategy into Your Business

When beginning a healthcare data analytics program, you should assess the readiness of your organization to accept and implement the strategy.  

1. Designate someone to be in charge of the analytics

The very first step in implementing a reporting strategy is to designate someone within your organization to handle the reporting and analysis.  It’s important that this person is familiar with reporting and healthcare data analysis so that everything is completed correctly and accurately.  

Putting one person in charge will also streamline the analytics process. They are able to work on the reports and subsequent analysis individually and diffuse the information to relevant providers and supervisors.  This will avoid any report duplication, due to a lack of communication between providers, or errors made by those who are less experienced with the software and analytics process.  

2. Decide on the data to track

In order to start tracking data for healthcare in your business, you must first decide what data you want to track.  First, identify some areas of improvement that your business is working on right now.  Could analytics reporting help improve these outcomes?  The answer is most likely yes.  Creating reports on data regarding areas you are trying to improve allows you to track overall progress, identify effective strategies, and re-evaluate those that are ineffective.

Tracking data in areas of strength can also be beneficial for your business.  This will allow you to gather an arsenal of healthcare data that can be leveraged when sharing outcomes with leadership, marketing your business, or evaluating patient outcomes.  Keeping track of positive data concretely demonstrates business growth and client progress over periods of time.

3. Gather the information in a report, and analyze it

Data doesn’t mean much until a healthcare data analysis is completed to give value to the numbers.  Once you have a report generated, it’s important to interpret and analyze the data to show how it is affecting your business.  Putting the reported numbers together into a comprehensive analysis will allow you to break down the information into an easily understandable medium for the rest of your team.  

For example, you can analyze the data by comparing it to data from the previous time period. You can identify both positive and negative trends in each area so that your team can work together to either improve the negative numbers or work on strategies to elevate the positive ones.  

4. Share your healthcare data analysis

The only way that analytics reporting can benefit your business is if it is shared with the other members of your team.  Once other team members are able to see the healthcare data, interpret it, and add to the already present analysis.  Having a discussion around the results of the report and analysis will allow the team to come up with strategies to improve data and implement new workflows to improve the measured outcomes.  

How to Use Your Reports to Benefit Your Healthcare Business

The information in your reports is vital to improving the outcomes of your business and your clients.  There are a variety of ways to leverage your reports, depending on which part of your business you are looking to increase success.  Here are a few examples of how to use reports to evaluate outcomes and make positive change in your business:

• Corporate Wellness: Tracking client data and outcomes to share with employers and human resources departments. Track common fields like goals completed, weight, BMR, health education / satisfaction of service (Scales of 1-10), lab value changes, engagement levels and participation in webinars and courses, appointments completed, and packages purchased outside of what was included initially
• Engagement in a Concierge Plan: See how active clients are in terms of client logging, messaging, and relate these to outcomes.
• Goal Achievement: Use the Client Activity (Goals, Log-ins, Posts) to assess how client’s are achieving their goals
• Group Practice Billing: Download data around your appointments, tie that into out-of-pocket and insurance billing, assess performance, and track Superbills / CMS 1500s.
• Quizzes and Surveys: Leverage your intake forms, build quizzes and download results to get feedback and assess performance.
• Pre and Post-Program Assessment: surveys administered before and after a program or intervention are valuable in demonstrating the outcomes achieved by your services.

Leveraging Healthie Reports

Healthie’s Reports are leveraged by providers and organizations that seek to have critical metrics at their fingertips and can be used to draw business insights, better market services to prospective clients, share outcomes with stakeholders and partners, and aggregate survey responses to assess client engagement and satisfaction.

Data can be pulled and generated in a CSV file or available directly via Healthie’s API. The type of informatics available includes client information and activity, client metrics and health outcomes, appointment history, and statuses (including no-show rates, most common appointment types, credits, etc), payment information (Bank transfers, Superbills, CMS 1500 data).

Each business is unique and may have individual reporting needs. Healthie’s team is able to generate custom reports as well as visual healthcare data analytics dashboards for your organization. Custom reports can help you analyze initiatives and outcomes specific to your organizations, such as the popularity of different appointment types, the effectiveness of programs on client outcomes, and more. To learn how you can test all of these features for your practice for free, click here.

Interested in learning more about data driven healthcare reporting in Healthie, or custom reports? Reach out to our team today hello@gethealthie.com.