Electronic Health Reporter

By Abhinav Shashank, CEO and co-founder, Innovaccer.

What makes Super Bowls, banking transactions, and online search results altogether more special?

As an ardent supporter, concerned customer, and curious observer, I keep witnessing all three of them in real time. I want the best experience every time that I am the end user, and so does everyone else. In this day and age, it shouldn’t be an unrealistic dream anyway. We should be able to know the score in real time and in the same way, our credit card transactions as and when they happen.

Why doesn’t my healthcare data show the complete picture?

Ironically, for healthcare organizations, real-time updates are not always available while making decisions that can potentially impact patients throughout their lives. Traditionally, many solutions were not even made to optimize the time that providers spend with their patients. Rather, they were only built to ingest data in electronic formats, evaluate macro-level performance trends, and in the best case scenario, provide top stakeholders with financial trends in a concise manner.

Though most organizations today have business intelligence (BI) infrastructures in place, most of the insights generated through them are only good for analyzing things in retrospect and do not really assist providers in the moment of care.

Activated data is the backbone of healthcare technology

It’s one thing to know what is wrong, it is another to have a way of addressing it. For instance, notes from the last appointment with a patient can only provide care teams with half of the story. Unless care providers have a holistic pool of information regarding the patient’s whereabouts, they cannot initiate personalized care plans or impart evidence-based care.

Healthcare leadership should look for activating data from different facilities in their bid to maximize the knowledge base of their providers. Once they have all the data points, they can begin to run customized analytics to support clinical decision-making.

Healthcare of the 2020s needs embedded analytics

Any information that is not delivered in a prompt manner is stale. While BI solutions talk about the best outcomes an organization can achieve, embedded analytics assists each stakeholder in enabling the process at a grassroots level.

BI may offer interactive dashboards, static reports and comprehensive scorecards, and while they offer instrumental insights, today’s healthcare requires more than that. The more empowered physicians are, the better they can engage with patients and optimize care and cost outcomes. However, to realize this goal, providers need actionable insights woven right into their workflows at the right time to make sense of the endless data.

Embedded analytics provides care teams with a platform that seamlessly integrates different BI applications and puts them in control of all of the information they require for imparting care- just the way it should be delivered. Based on point-of-care technology, care teams can rapidly determine the best practices for their populations and steer healthcare towards efficiency.

The road ahead

If I had to define the difference between BI and embedded analytics, I’d say it’s like that of an atlas and navigation application. Embedded analytics has already set a tone for the future. In years to come, we will see tangible impacts in the direction of bench marking and action-oriented analytics. We have come a long way when it comes to putting data to use, and healthcare should be the last field where people are scrambling for data.