May 9
2023
How Hospitals Can Use Their Historical Data To Their Advantage
By Ophir Ronen, CEO, CalmWave.
Hospitals routinely collect vast amounts of data, including information about patients’ health, care delivery, and organizational performance. This data could theoretically be utilized to drive huge improvements in health outcomes and operational efficiency.
Rather than this massive amount of health data being an advantage, it’s most often considered a burden as there are inconsistencies in documentation, aggregation methods, organization of, display of, and most importantly, how it’s used.
There’s also a lack of resources required to effectively manage this overwhelming amount of information. The data gap not only leads to lost opportunities to improve healthcare but is a major contributor to some of healthcare’s current biggest issues like burnout and staffing. Hospitals are always striving to better leverage healthcare data. Revised processes that reduce manual inputs, eliminate redundancy, and include central EHR systems are a few goals that come to mind. However, some of the biggest wins will only be gained once we tap into more advanced tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI).
With so much medical information already available, including large complex data sets, sophisticated AI systems are just what the doctor ordered to get these data sets organized and in use. To unlock data, hospitals must incorporate more data science and use artificial intelligence (AI) methods to operationalize their learnings.
Data science is an umbrella term for statistical techniques, design techniques, and development methods. It involves pre-processing analysis, prediction, and visualization, whereas AI is the implementation of a predictive model to foresee events. Advanced data science and AI can not only help organize all of this information, but also generate trends and insights so that hospitals can deliver more precise care, identify operational hazards, and create a more optimized approach for managing their current workload.
Many Sources of Information
The problem, as it stands, is too much information from disparate sources and in different formats. Hospital data comes from a variety of places, such as electronic health records, administrative systems, insurance providers, patient-submitted forms, local HR systems, hospital medical devices, and, remote monitoring services.
This information also comes in various forms, including structured digital data, physical documents, photographs, charts, and more. The volume and diversity of data make it difficult to store in conventional databases and format it for use across multiple frameworks.