How much data does your healthcare organization generate every year? You may not realize it, but all that data contains a gold mine of information you can utilize to your benefit through medical practice analytics, also known as healthcare analytics. By using data analytics and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs), your practice can gain valuable insights into physician performance, patient health, practice management, and much more from your medical software.
Below, our team at Weave discusses the importance of leveraging practice analytics, how to measure KPIs and evaluate data, and what you can learn from using analytics tools.
The Importance of Utilizing Your Medical Practice Analytics
Why are data science and practice analytics so important for the healthcare industry?
Every healthcare provider produces medical records. For example, when a patient has an appointment, the related information goes into an electronic health record (EHR) or electronic medical record (EMR).
Plus, there’s also more information and health data regarding medical billing, demographics, financials, and so on. However, all this health data is essential for more than just informative purposes.
Using structured and unstructured (or Big Data) analytics can help with practice management and improve patient satisfaction—and more. Leveraging data analytics can help healthcare organizations in many different ways, and not just for public health reasons:
The Primary Benefits of Using Data Analytics
Making smarter decisions: When you can take healthcare and patient data and examine it with analytics tools, you can gain valuable insights and make smarter, data-driven decisions. For example, you can make well-informed judgments about treatments within your patient populations, ensuring them the best possible care.
Predicting risk: The future of healthcare lies with health informatics and data analytics, shifting focus to prevention instead of cure. By collecting data on patient outcomes and using predictive analytics, you can gain advanced knowledge about common causes of disease and other conditions. You can also learn how to identify common symptoms, allowing you to diagnose and monitor the patient population more accurately.
Improving Quality of Care: Using healthcare analytics can also help you improve service, quality of care, and patient satisfaction. For example, you could use data and analytics software to determine the busiest times at your practice and ensure adequate staffing. Furthermore, data analysis fosters more efficient population health management, improves the quality of care, and builds a positive reputation for your practice.
Reducing Costs: Improving production and operating more efficiently are two additional benefits that can reduce costs for healthcare providers that learn critical insights through tools like descriptive analytics.
Medical Practice Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KIPs) to Measure
What are the most important metrics and KPIs to measure when collecting data for analysis? Start with clinical data, patient data, electronic medical records, and other health informatics, which we’ll discuss below. You can use a patient portal or dashboard to make your data collection fast, simple, and convenient:
Active Patients: Obtaining a current active patient list and data set is essential for any medical provider. It can help you discover ways to improve production and clinical quality, streamline your practice management, and improve patient care by preventing things like overbooking or long wait times
Scheduled Production vs. Unscheduled Patients: Does your medical practice run smoothly and manage a stable balance between scheduled and unscheduled patients? Try examining the data by splitting it into different categories by department, length of visit, total appointments, or inbound referrals.
Cancellations: Every healthcare provider must deal with patient cancellations, resulting in lost income opportunities. You can measure no-shows, late patients, and appointments lost due to forced referrals or unavailable providers.
New Client Appointments: While it’s always easier to retain existing patients than get new ones, tracking new patient appointments provides necessary data on patient care, production, and how fast your practice is growing.
Reappointments: Do you often have patients who reschedule or ask for a reappointment? You lose time and income from the first rescheduling and then must open another time slot that you could potentially lose. You can use descriptive analytics to identify reappointment patterns and avoid those unnecessary expenses.
Insights You Can Pull From Your Medical Data Analytics
Healthcare analytic software like Weave will help you gain actionable insights and crucial information about your medical practice. The world of health IT (information technology) is growing, and collecting health data through practice analytics now plays a critical role in the evolution of practice management, patient care, and healthcare in general.
So what kind of insights can you gain from practice analytics? Some of the best benefits your clinical practice can gain from health data analysis include:
- Patient care and population health benefits, which may include evaluation of health data, such as patient outcomes regarding medical treatments—for example, you can collect data regarding patients’ habits, lifestyles, home health care, and more to make smarter, more effective treatment recommendations
- Closing any gaps in the clinical quality of your practice and patient care
- Cutting down on unnecessary spending—for example, you can use clinical analytics to identify patients with the highest risk of (re)admission and provide proactive care
- Identifying variables that contribute to efficient medical practice management, like reducing waste, optimizing resources, or streamlining the supply chain to predict revenue.
- Setting growth and efficiency goals by using data analytics to track metrics like productivity and benchmark your progress
Weave: Helping Health Professionals Gain Insights Through Practice Analytics
At Weave, we know the importance and benefits that health data can provide to the modern-day healthcare industry through data analytics. With our cutting-edge software and communication tools, you can utilize medical practice analytics to streamline your practice, enhance efficiency, improve population health, and more.
Every actionable insight you gain can drive growth for your medical practice—something that’s critical for continued success. At Weave, we offer a centralized platform, medical software, and advanced tools that make data collection and analysis fast and simple. Want to learn more about Weave? Set up a free demo today to learn more about our data analytics solutions and how they can help your practice evolve successfully.
