Using Data and Analytics to Improve Patient Experience

Harnessing the power of health data is now a top priority for healthcare organizations. The healthcare industry is becoming more patient-friendly, after its decades of ignorance in that aspect. Studies reveal ¹ 72% of providers feel consumer-centric strategies are important, with 25% investing in them and nearly 90% making related staffing changes.

According to a study, if a healthcare organization loses one dissatisfied patient, they effective lose nearly $200,000 in revenue over their lifetime.

This is because over 53 percent of patients say they value a great experience from their care provider.

The consumerization of healthcare is changing patients’ expectations as they have started demanding a retail like experience.

Going forward, healthcare organizations will succeed only if they improve their services to cater to patient sentiments and deliver seamless experiences.

An Overview of Patient Experience

Patients today share vital information about their experience with an HCO’s staff, doctors, services, and environment. Patients demand better services and want the healthcare organizations to be highly involved in their wellness journey. They are looking for transparent and fast information sharing and expect to be kept updated at all times.

They share these experiences on various platforms including social media, discussion forums, feedback, and surveys.

When all this data is crunched together and analyzed, we can draw important insights on the performance and attributes that affect the performance of the providers in terms of experience delivered.

The derived insights can serve to steer decision making within the organization. The quantum and complexity of healthcare data make for a strong case for using Big Data architectures. This coupled with advanced analytics algorithms enables prediction of critical metrics like readmission rates. Predictive analytics presents an opportunity for healthcare providers to take proactive actions to improve the overall patient experience and elevate their ranking as a care provider.

How Data and Analytics can Augment Patient Experience

Data and analytics can be leveraged by healthcare providers to improve patient experience from the following perspectives:

• Sentiment Analysis – By analyzing the data collected from social media and surveys including feedback forms, the most unpopular areas that require focus can be identified. This can affect operational strategy and new processes can be evolved to make the experience of the patient smoother.

• Predicting risks – Health risks especially in the case of chronic patients are a huge deterrent to the lives of patients. Using predictive analytics, the degree of threat to each patient can be forecasted. This helps care-coordinators in focusing on critical patients first and taking necessary steps beforehand.

• Proactive interventions – If we can predict the possibility of incidents with patients beforehand, effective interventions can be made early on. By analyzing the pattern of interventions that have been successful in similar patients in the past, new patients can be recommended effective interventions. This would go a long way in helping patients lead healthy lives.
• Personalized Recommendations – One-size-fits-all is an outmoded strategy. Patients like consumers demand to be given the special treatment especially when it comes to their health. Making each interaction between the HCO and the patient relevant can lead to multifold benefits. Patients’ health improves as well as cost for the HCO goes down leading to better profitability and higher brand value.

• Hospital-acquired Conditions – If a healthcare organization wants to reduce HACs, it would need access to exhaustive data and a number of stakeholders. By analyzing patient interactions and studying historical data for infections that spread in hospital premises, new standard operating procedures can be devised. This would ensure a safe and secure environment for the patients. With an analytics platform integrated with real-time reporting, the necessary information can be captured for improvement teams to work on HAC interventions.

• Resource Availability – A large part of the patient experience involves the assignment of resources when they arrive at the hospital premises. Data analytics can be used for rationing the number of nurses and doctors available especially as per the day by day increasing workload of patients. Patients would be highly benefited such as current bed availability can be determined when a patient is registered into or shifted into a larger facility for some reason.

• Practitioner Performance – If healthcare organizations are to deliver exceptional patient experiences, they must measure and optimize practitioner performance. Root cause analysis can be used to identify the area that is lacking for each practitioner and required trainings can be provided to improve performance. This will promise positive shifts in the quality of care and result in a better experience.

Instead of focusing on reimbursement in a case-by-case method, under the value-based model, healthcare organizations will have to optimize care quality and performance better by ensuring that the health of their patients improve.

Patient experience will continue to be a differentiator for care providers. One study shows that if you satisfy one patient, that positive experience reached four patients. However, one negative experience impacts 10 potential patients.

The ITC Infotech Advantage

Our integrated health analytics platform – Healthcare Insights can allow you to leverage Big Data, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning for your healthcare enterprise.

Use our expertise in healthcare analytics to drive better outcomes, improve patient satisfaction, generate higher revenue, and optimize the cost of care at your healthcare organization.