Mar 20
2020
3 Steps Any Healthcare Organization Can Take To Improve Enterprise Analytics
By Kristin Weir, vice president of product, MedeAnalytics.
When it comes down to the most basic purpose of why organizations use analytics, it’s simple: they want to uncover insights that help them take the next best step or make the best decision. These healthcare organizations often need, however, all the components of the enterprise analytics story to be able to do that.
Unfortunately, few organizations today have that capability because of the fragmented nature of the healthcare analytics industry. There are hundreds of vendors claiming to do healthcare analytics in the market. Many of those vendors offer wonderful point solutions, whether it be for population health, revenue cycle management, cost and operations, or employer reporting. But this partitioning of analytics has led to organizations purchasing upwards of 20 or more different solutions.
Each niche solution is like a chapter in the entire book of the enterprise analytics story that the organization is telling. The problem in that scenario is that each chapter is from 20 different books and they don’t tell a comprehensive story. In analytics terms, those chapters are not interoperable.
Organizations with multiple niche solutions are faced with trying to stitch together chapters from different books to create their stories. One book is a mystery, the next a romance, the next is sci-fi and so forth. By the time a single story is created, the narrative is confusing, incomplete and utterly incomprehensible by end-users.
Reading chapters from the same book, however, helps healthcare tell a comprehensive, single, trustworthy story. They can weave together insights from different chapters to arrive at the conclusion.
What does having one book mean from an enterprise analytics perspective? With enterprise analytics, you are extending analytics across the healthcare ecosystem. You’ll be able to accelerate goals and solve business challenges, improve outcomes for providers, strengthen cost and quality for health plans, and create a single source of truth on one platform with interoperable solutions.
Why do healthcare organizations use so many different vendors? There are a variety of reasons, but these are the top two:
- They may have purchased at the department level versus the enterprise level, which often puts the focus of the procurement only on the needs of the department.
- As healthcare has evolved, new requirements for enterprise analytics have emerged. Existing vendors may have done a, b, and c well, but now there’s a need for x, y and z; and that is something the original vendor can’t solve for.