Population health analytics is extensively leveraged by healthcare delivery networks that manage numerous hospitals and clinics, provide care to hundreds of thousands of patients, and employ tens of thousands of personnel. Healthcare systems leverage population health analytics to pursue the Triple Aim of reducing per capita costs, and enhancing patient experience and population health. Healthcare networks pinpoint particular areas for enhancement, and the outcomes affect every hospital within the network.
Since enhancing the population health analytics, large healthcare networks report tens of millions of dollars of yearly savings in sections related to most significant healthcare expenses such as care after stroke and cardiovascular (CV) disease. What approach do healthcare systems use to attain such remarkable outcomes?
If healthcare systems adopt population health analytics, they can achieve their objectives of improving population health via adhering to clinical guidelines related to specific critical health conditions, transforming care delivery with minimised clinical variation, trying out innovative processes and billing methods, and discovering new strategies for delivering effective patient care.
Healthcare organisations will be able to reduce the primary cost drivers in specific health system programs and achieve savings or generate revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. This will contribute to the overall financial stability of the organisations.
However, the absence of appropriate analytics tools causes clinical practice variation, overuse of supplies, documentation mistakes, and other challenges, driving up costs and adversely affecting patient outcomes. Healthcare networks often struggle to concentrate on the most pressing issues, as they attempt to tackle the entire problem at the same time.
Challenges to Achieving the Triple Aim in Healthcare
In their attempts to reduce healthcare expenses, organisations encounter challenges in areas such as utilisation of medical materials and resources, supply costs, medical documentation, and clinical practices. Here is a more comprehensive list of issues requiring solutions:
Supply Costs Gaps
- Non-labour costs surpassing revenues across numerous hospitals
- Rapidly rising prices of various materials and supplies (the second-largest cost driver after labour) in the past few years
- Elevated costs of particular procedures, such as electrophysiology in cardiovascular programs. These costs impact the overall budget for specialised care management initiatives.
- Giving a demand for routine diagnostic tests for prices higher than national benchmarks
- Lack of standardised protocols for selecting and using medical supplies to minimise variables in spending
- Shortage of a standardised supply agreement shared among all providers throughout a healthcare network
- Fragmentation of supply contracts and vendors throughout the healthcare network
Issues Related to Overuse and Length of Stay (LOS)
- Excessive use of supplies, for example laboratory tests.
- Overuse of medical resources, for instance, transfusion supplies, that results in additional costs and unnecessary patient health risks
- Unjustifiably prolonged inpatient stay
Clinical Procedure Weaknesses
- Diverse сare protocols for patients with severe health conditions, e.g., heart failure (HF).
- Absence of strategies and programs of clear ownership of care management and coordination to address ongoing challenges, particularly with conditions like heart failure (HF).
- Operational and geographical variety of healthcare centres with the same specialisation, which complexifies the implementation of universal recommendations for practice changes
Medical Documentation Challenges
- Forfeiting millions of dollars due to missing or incorrect documentation necessary to validate proper billing and coding.
- Lack of analytics tools to detect absent documentation before patient discharge, allowing for completion on time.
Key Challenges to Revenue Growth and Improved Service Delivery
- The impact of specific diseases and health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease (CVD), on the reduced life expectancy of Americans.
- The need to concentrate on diseases with an increased death rate. To affect total population health, it is necessary to detect and address such illnesses.
- Care optimisation across the whole target sector is imperative to stimulate substantial changes.
- Substantial expenses for the treatment of certain health issues, such as cardiovascular disease.
- Uncertain target areas in the treatment of specific diseases that first of all require improvement and ambiguity about how to tackle them.
- The intricacy of healthcare systems that combine numerous medical centres and hospitals, and require enhancement across the system.
- Centralised processes that divert attention from the particular needs of standalone facilities
- Distinguishing between enhancements that will impact all providers and those that will only influence a subset of them.
Features of Population Health Analytics Software
To lower expenses and tackle variations and resource over utilisation, healthcare networks require analytics to swiftly pinpoint areas needing improvement and address them systematically. Population health analytics support healthcare organisations in the following ways:
Clinical Practice Analysis
- Examine internal data to identify variations in clinical practices and uncover opportunities for enhancement, in areas such as length-of-stay trends, community health trends, lab test utilisation, intensive care unit (ICU) bed usage, and more.
- Identify variations in clinical practices to determine which ones need adjustment to achieve cost reductions and improved clinical outcomes.
- Detect unnecessary extensions of inpatient stays, which result in a reduction in length-of-stay (LOS).
Supply Chain Optimisation
- Visualise the quantities of resources used and contrast them with industry standards and guidelines. For instance, transfusion dashboards can be introduced to track the appropriate use of blood and blood products.
- Examine current supplies to determine whether their regular ordering is essential. For instance, clinical research may reveal that some blood tests are obsolete and can be discontinued, while others are excessive and can be minimised.
- Distribute the common supplies pricing file to all network providers through the information technology system.
- Evaluate the proposals from supply chain vendors to choose the most favourable terms for all hospitals within the network.
Oversight of Documentation and Data Accuracy
- Assess the diagnosis and identify any missing details concerning current patients, allowing for the completion of documentation gaps while the patient is still admitted.
- Evaluate similar healthcare networks across the state and identify possible coding mistakes to enhance documentation accuracy and coding for specific patient groups on time.
Advantages of Using Population Health Analytics Software
Data analytics tools assist healthcare systems in achieving significant results in lowering healthcare expenses and improving patient outcomes by optimising workflows in areas such as supply chain management, clinical practices, resource utilisation, and documentation. According to reports, analytics have led to the following achievements:
Improving Patient Experience
- Healthcare networks lower readmission rates and encourage self-care in patients, such as taking medications as directed and receiving timely follow-up, by offering thorough care coordination.
Minimising Costs
- Gaining a deeper understanding of a patient’s condition directly results in more exact coding and billing practices.
- By utilising real-time data from their enterprise data warehouse (EDW) healthcare networks can identify and address operational challenges and clinical practice variations affecting specific care programs and costs.
- Networks achieve yearly savings/revenue of tens of millions of dollars due to their enhanced services. They can continue to boost their savings in the coming years if they maintain their enhancement efforts.
- Networks establish contracts with supply vendors for product consolidation and obtain favourable volume pricing for all providers, including discounts on high-cost items.
- Organisations can greatly decrease the ordering of overused resources and eliminate the regular ordering of unnecessary supplies, such as lab tests, leading to significant cost savings.
- Healthcare systems can cut down lengths of stay (LOS) by hundreds of days, resulting in savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple years.
- Healthcare providers tackle clinical variation by utilising current evidence-based guidelines, educating providers, and using EHR alerts to greatly decrease the use of medical resources.
Enhancing Population Health
- Healthcare initiatives launched by healthcare networks and other medical organisations to improve health through lifestyle changes at the community level receive national recognition and contribute to better population health.
How a Healthcare Software Development Company Can Assist
An outsourcing company like Belitsoft that specialises in healthcare software development assists top healthcare data analytics companies in building robust data operating systems.
For integrated data platforms developed to collect, store, process, and analyse large volumes of data from various sources (Electronic Medical Records, clinic management systems, laboratory systems, financial systems, etc.), the healthcare software development companies:
- Automate data processing workflows (cleansing, standardisation, and normalisation)
- Configure scalable data warehouses
- Set up and implement analytical tools for creating dashboards, reports, and data visualisations
- Ensure a high level of data security and compliance with healthcare regulations such as HIPAA
- Integrate machine learning and AI into analytics.
They also assist in developing tailored analytical tools, such as Population Health Analytics, for:
- Leveraging real-time data to facilitate thorough analysis and research.
- Monitoring performance metrics related to lab tests, length of stay, utilisation of care units, and so on.
- Compiling comprehensive reports for clinical practice management.
If you are looking for expertise in data analytics, data infrastructure, data platforms, HL7 interfaces, workflow engineering, and development within cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), hybrid, or on-premises environments, a healthcare software development company like Belitsoft also can serve these needs.
