How Data Analytics Is Changing Small Practice Healthcare … From The Inside Out.

Last month I had to take my daughter to the hospital. The diagnosis? A common cold, very common in kids her age. I did what any 31-year-old parent did… Googled. I went online to find a provider in my area, that was available that same day and drove there. While there, got to the receptionist which greeted me by my name, knew my daughter’s name and asked us to sit. With no calls made, without leaving her desk, the receptionist seemed to have connected telepathically with the provider, who in less than five minutes was already asking us about symptoms and taking notes.

The whole process ended about an hour later, with a parent at ease, 5 days’ worth of treatment, and a sudden realization: technology, data, business analysts, visionary leaders and hundreds of other data-savvy people made that interaction not only possible but smooth and painless.

This aligns with my experience as a data person. Data, used correctly, shapes every interaction we have had, and fortunately, this truth is making its way through our healthcare. Business intelligence is shaping the way we interact with our providers, insurances, and even other patients. The difference this makes is profound. Healthcare has been historically a market resistant to change. Providers still use paper forms, pharmacies still use paper Rx, and in 2022, we still see fax machines in medical offices.

Data and technology have been present in healthcare for some time, but they have not been fully developed and utilized in smaller practices in the United States. However, data analytics is finally making a powerful entrance into our healthcare. We can boil it down to 3 main trends in how providers perceive the market:

CONSUMERISM IN HEALTHCARE

In recent years, there has been a shift in the healthcare landscape. Healthcare is evolving, the days of the doctor knowing everything and the patient blindly trusting are gone. Patients are no longer content to sit back and let their doctor make all the decisions. Now, more than ever, patients are taking charge of their health and their healthcare journey and being empowered to make choices about their health. And they should be. After all, it’s their health. They want to be involved in their care and they want to be informed about their options.

As patients become increasingly aware of the importance of healthcare, they are starting to think of it as a service, just like any other. They are searching for providers, in the same way, they would search for any other product on Amazon, taking into account reviews and star ratings. This shift in thinking means that patients are no longer just going to the provider around the corner, but are instead choosing the one that best meets their needs. Data Analytics is allowing providers and medical practices to track their patients’ behavior when searching for a doctor, this includes understanding which consumer profiles are visiting certain pages the most and scheduling more appointments for certain specialties and why. Here data analytics plays a crucial role in helping practices understand why patients are searching for a particular doctor or service. This information can be used to improve the overall patient experience and drive more business.

In this area, the business decisions taken based on consumer profiling and behavioral analytics can set certain businesses and practices as clear winners.

DATA AWARENESS

Open your health app and the first you might see is a dashboard with data about your steps today, heart rate, sleep quality and others. Medical practices are becoming more data savvy and are increasingly leveraging data to make more informed decisions to make accurate decisions. But wait, Elver, this is not a trend or anything new. Get your head in the game!

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, and one of the most notable changes is the average age of providers. As new, younger providers join the workforce, they bring with them a greater comfort level with technology, graphs, filters, excel, and dashboards. This shift is driving the demand for new, better solutions that are more user-friendly and interactive and most importantly, fast ways to make decisions. Having a dashboard with your net revenue collection, outstanding AR, and even provider occupancy is now the norm within medical practices. More and more decisions are being made based on data rather than intuition. The challenge becomes then, the everyday challenge for data experts, how do you condense, gamify, and allow for better decision-making with 3 seconds’ worth of attention span? Creating data is not enough, but true business intelligence is becoming the norm.

PATIENT-CENTRIC FOCUS

Remember we spoke about consumerism in healthcare? This also brings a new trend: patient-centric healthcare versus illness-centric healthcare. Metrics such as wait times, patient level of effort, patient experience, and post-appointment surveys are every time more predominant in our every day for providers, who now are shifting their focus from not only curing the illness but also ensuring the best possible patient experience resulting in better outcomes for everyone involved.

Using data analytics, practices can get a better handle on which metrics are most important to their patients and how they can improve in those areas.

This new trend is benefiting both patients and providers by giving them a better understanding of their needs and how they interact with the system and each other. This patient-centric focus helps to improve patient outcomes and satisfaction while also reducing costs. If patients are thinking like consumers, practices must start thinking like service providers, which are now more than ever easily exchangeable for the provider’s next block.

DID YOU NOTICE IT?

Did you? All my experience with my daughter, the provider, and a pesky cold, from beginning to end, was engineered by and through data, designed to produce more data, that then can be analyzed for my providers to make even more decisions based on data. Every step of the way, the practice was aware of what was happening, where I was, and what was I doing, setting a bar for how long I should have been there before my experience deteriorated.

And practice management softwares are also catching up to these trends, making it easier for providers to manage every step of the process, from positioning themselves to the right audience and target patient segments to understanding their performance during and after every patient visit, all the way to analyzing, in very simple and organic ways, very complex things as revenue generated and outstanding balances. Tech healthcare is here to stay, and so is a new era of business intelligence in healthcare, not only for the tech giants but the provider down the street also now using data to provide a better consumer experience even before the experience starts.