Follow-up Measures Reduce Patient Re-admissions

Nowadays, hospitals and care settings in the US are deploying care management technology to reduce the rate of hospital re-admissions. The use of the population health management solutions enables multispecialty practices and healthcare organizations to ensure appropriate follow-ups for discharged patients. 

It is a common trend in the US for most big healthcare practices to employ various hospitalist programs to separate inpatient from outpatient care and to regulate the presence of the discharged patients in hospital. These huge healthcare practices are keen to implement various software and applications to provide quality care and boost productivity.  Outpatient portal solution for hospitals is one of these initiatives that help providers to have full access to patient records while maintaining a constant communication with the primary care physician. 

Some providers are using SaaS applications, mobile patient portal solutions and other Healthcare IT software to identify gaps in care, communicate with patients regarding preventative or chronic care, automate care management, and measure effectiveness in population health management. With the help of these measures, the hospital staff is able to contact their discharged patients on a daily basis and assess their health and well-being, especially patients with two or more chronic diseases. The number of contacted patients can go up to 14 to 40 everyday depending on the size of healthcare settings. According to Claudia Webb, Executive Director of Elmhurst Clinic on care management solutions, “By precisely targeting patients at high risk for readmission and automating outreach to them, regular follow-ups allow our staff to spend less time attempting to contact discharged patients and more time providing specific care to those in need.”

Engaging Patients through EHRs

Engaging patients in their healthcare and involving their families alike is the main priority of healthcare providers in today’s healthcare scenario. The term Patient Engagement implies the involvement of patients and makes them realize the importance of being more responsible towards their healthcare information. This, in turn, is also related to specific benefits and certain conditions and standards that eligible providers have to meet.

The engagement of patients and their families in the patients’ healthcare is a prominent goal of the EHR Incentive Program. Implementing meaningful use of IT is the second of five health policy priorities that aims to improve patient engagement and enhance  quality care. It also encourages the idea of involving patients’ families because many patients depend on them for  support.  Healthcare providers find that the use of certified EHR technologies will make health information available to their patients and their families. 

 

Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirement suggests that providers to increase the use of patient portals and enhance email communication between physicians and patients. This makes providers to work  hard to meet MU requirement in a timely fashion. But, there are many challenges that providers and healthcare IT service providers are facing alike. For instance, according to a report in the US, nearly half of American adults do not adequately understand the written health information on patient portals. Second, according to The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the number of people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English has grown by 140 percent over the last few decades. Thus, providers and IT vendors are seeking ways to overcome these challenges in the future, as well as to engage more patients, and improve ways for better care.

Healthcare Informatics for Better Healthcare

The advent of new healthcare technologies, medications, treatments, and procedures, is pushing providers and clinicians to incorporate  them into their healthcare settings. Physicians absorb and integrate both old and new knowledge to their practices, and apply the same to their patients’ care. To provide quality care and a better patient experience, healthcare settings are implementing digital technology so that they can get an instant access to each patient’s individual health status and background, and can communicate quickly with patients, hospitals, and other providers. 

However, in the past, meeting these expectations was difficult because of the obvious reasons. Lack of digital technology, absence of EHR/ EMR systems to organize, store, and retrieve medical and patient information and the systems like HIE were not developed. 

However today, new tools and methodologies exist that can help clinicians meet each of these challenges and the use of healthcare informatics supports health information technology, medical practice and medical research to gain better insights and outcomes. To that end, health informatics involves systems such EHR/ EMR, HIE standards, medical terminologies such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms, and portable medical devices for the collection and analysis of data, management and use of information in health care.

Here, the healthcare software developers play an important role in providing user-friendly software and smart apps so that clinicians can combat with the prevailing challenges such as improving the quality of patient care and patient safety, preventing medical errors, reducing costs, helping patients manage their conditions, and minimizing the impact of bio-terrorism.

Is data analytics a new word for business intelligence?

Organizations across the world are struggling to develop the proficiency to aggregate, analyze, and make the available data valuable. With the volume and variety of data we have today, the shift from achieving new insights to making a strong impact on businesses has become more important than ever. The most effective data-driven organizations today are honing their skills to quickly utilize and make meaningful use of this big data to find the most effective and best actions or outcomes. 

Big data analytics and business intelligence help organizations discover the power within their data assets and create better ways to meet critical objectives. These include reducing costs, satisfying customer base, expanding market presence in different geographies, and using data to drive innovation and optimizing business decisions. 

Business intelligence is referred to analyzing an organization’s raw data through a variety of software applications. As an independent discipline, it involves several data related activities such as data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting. It also helps in giving insights on historical trends and current business performance.  The best BI applications provide easy access to business users to allow them to quickly gain business insights.

Whereas, data analytics is a step forward, it not only just gives useful insights but also helps in creating business impact.  Predictive data analytics gives organizations future business models and algorithms that enable them to not only predict the most likely outcome, but the possible solutions.  This methodology or system enables organization to standardize and automate the whole process so that decision-making is not based on gut feeling but rather on fact based data.

Thus, business intelligence is an umbrella term which comprises big data and predictive analytics. Organizations are realizing the potential of BI, analytics, and big data to deliver value to business users by providing quality, interactive, and user-friendly applications.

Analytics: Enhancing Productivity of Healthcare Providers

The US healthcare industry is struggling with various issues such as sky rocketing care costs, substandard or inconsistent care services and inaccessibility to timely care. Cost, quality and access issues have increasingly become larger than ever as healthcare expenditure per capita is 2.4 times higher than that of other developed countries and is estimated to increase 67.9 percent over the next ten years. These concerns are taking a toll on the healthcare system. 

However, big data analytics in healthcare shows that the current challenges which the healthcare industry is facing are worsening due to other forces such as globalization, healthcare tourism, changing lifestyles, chronic diseases and the advent of new medical technologies and treatments.

To counter these challenges, Healthcare providers can upgrade their financial, clinical, and patient-care access data by applying the power of analytics. Actionable analytics for healthcare providers brings insights on how to keep pace with the rapid changes that the industry is undergoing. With the right healthcare data and healthcare analytics, healthcare organizations can ensure long-term success. 

Analytics addresses the following objectives:

1. Improve clinical effectiveness and patient satisfaction

·         Improve patient safety and reduce medical errors

·         Improve wellness, prevention and disease management

·         Improve customer satisfaction, acquisition and retention

2.  Improve operational effectiveness

·         Reduce costs and increase efficiency

·         Optimize catchment area and network management

·         Increase operating speed and adaptability

3. Improve financial and administrative performance

·         Increase revenue and ROI

·         Improve risk management and regulatory compliance

·         Reduce fraud and abuse

Saviance has deep domain expertise in Big Data analysis in the healthcare sector. Team Saviance is equipped to bring actionable analytics for providers and other caregivers in the right manner to set the future vision and improve business outcomes.