It’s no shock to anyone – the healthcare industry in the United States is tremendously inefficient. You don’t even have to look past paper waste to realize it – we’re talking $100-$150 billion annually in administrative inefficiencies alone.
Guess what that does for healthcare costs and patient treatment?
Fortunately, there are plenty of brilliant people at work to help reduce – and soon eliminate – many of these preventable errors, particularly by applying big data in a number of different ways. Read about some of these below.
Cost Reduction
Let’s begin with costs. Naturally, mobilizing big data could reduce costs for healthcare organizations. For one, big data analytics can drive care improvement, which in turn saves money. If you keep your patients from coming in, you incur less costs and keep a larger margin.
What about administrative costs? Healthcare administrative systems are composed of transactional systems that don’t always interact efficiently. Big data can assuage costs associated with administrative transactions to standardize medical approval and billing processes, upgrade to modern code systems to enhance coding processes, and improve logistics of managing devices within the practice environment.
Cross-System Data
Harnessing big data can help you mobilize data across various information systems. Suppose your practice needs communication across internal systems. The value isn’t to have these systems reporting separately, but having the ability to correlate data laterally across them.
This streamlines the way data is collected across your practice, instead of leaving you and your staff scrambling over scattered data across your organization. Big data analytics allows your practice to analyze unstructured data, saving time and money in the process.
Tracking Supplies
You can also use big data to track assets and supplies at your practice. These uses range from ensuring medical supplies are organized, stocked, and ready to use to overseeing your supply chain.
In other words, objects like catheters can be tracked on a real-time, per-patient basis, which promotes efficient utilization of supplies by guaranteeing you don’t forget them on a patient, which could result in further medical complications and more avoidable costs.
Big data is useful on all levels of healthcare, from patient visits up to government investigations of healthcare fraud. Harnessing its power is key, however, and staying up to date on the latest medical technologies is the path to doing so.
How are you using technology to reduce your practice’s inefficiencies?
