Electronic Health Reporter

By Adeel Sarwar, chief technology officer, CareCloud.

Whether you’re looking for creative ways to cut costs, boost revenue, or insulate an already stretched-too-thin workforce from burnout, one thing is for certain – healthcare leaders are suffering from data-induced decision paralysis.

Here’s why.

In today’s data-centric care climate, where analytics is king, organizations are realizing the value of making financial, clinical, and administrative decisions backed by data. But are leaders equipped to leverage the flood of insights they now have at their fingertips? And if so, what does data-backed, intelligent action look like?

Purpose-Driven Intelligence

Purpose-driven business intelligence provides organizations with insights to enhance or repair a specific business area or process. For the sake of this article, we will examine how a large national healthcare organization applied purpose-driven intelligent business data to improve the health and morale of its employees.

First, They Set a Goal

By narrowing its gaze on employee health and wellness data, the large national healthcare organization used intelligent analytics to set a hyper-focused mission: boost employee participation of its onsite clinic and health benefit services.

With so much data at your fingertips, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. By honing in on one organizational element, you’ll be better positioned to drill down deep, identify trends, and establish an action plan.

Then, They Focused on Manageable Change

Once the mission was set, the organization took a deep dive into its EHR data to better understand employee utilization of its various health clinics and classes. Empowered by the numbers, the organization constructed a plan to enhance participation of benefits and services most under-utilized by its employees.

As you work on your own organizational changes, keep in mind that the data may surprise you. Trust the numbers and let them guide your decisions.

They Engaged their Staff

To drive interest and engage employees, the organization decided to launch a points-based scorecard system that awards employees for logging activity across various health clinics and services. This system encouraged employees to take advantage of onsite classes and resources and empowered leaders to identify areas of improvement within high-impact programs.

Making organizational changes can be challenging, which is why leadership and staff buy-in is critical. To do this, communicate your plan, educate and train on new processes, and then set parameters that keep everyone accountable and engaged.

And Finally, they Built a Habit

It’s never enough to ‘set it and forget it,’ which is why the organization built a dashboard to assess quarterly scorecard results. This data gave the organization a window into how its benefits and services were being received over time. Armed with these new insights, the organization set itself up to spot and nurture its most poorly attended services.

Make a habit of monitoring your data on a regular cadence. Whether its weekly, monthly, or quarterly, let the frequency be determined by the changes you’ve made and the impacts you’re tracking. The only way to measure your success is to identify where you’ve been and how far you’ve come.

By taking a purpose-built approach to analyzing business data, this organization was successfully able to identify a resource gap, build an appropriate action plan, and measure its success over the following weeks and months. Not only was the organization successful in improving the physical and mental health of its employees, but it created a data-backed system to identify and mitigate future attendance gaps. You too can use purpose-built data to drive your organization’s financial and operational decisions.