There is Lot of Value to Adopting a BI System
By Edward Keiper, President and CEO of Velocity
Healthcare has been slow to adopt Business Intelligence, but there’s a lot of value to adopting a BI system. Consider that the typical medical practice is actually many businesses rolled up into one. Each aspect of a medical office is, in a way, its own department, from the front desk to finance. There’s billing, payroll, supply orders and budget, human resources, as well as IT. And of course, there’s the core aspect of every medical practice: patient care.
With so many plates spinning, practice managers may lean toward a more conservative business decision-making plan, relying on the basics, such as reports and baseline statistics to cull data on practice function and implementation. The problem is that these basic numbers are just the tip of the data iceberg, and in a medical practice, more data means more efficiency.
A Thomson Reuters study found that the medical industry wastes $700 billion annually on avoidable, identifiable issues, such as administrative inefficiency, lack of coordination, unnecessary care and provider errors. The only way to determine if your practice is wasting money and resources is to adopt business intelligence tools.
Identify wasted spending and other systematic flaws by constantly monitoring and tracking business performance data through a complete business intelligence solution that aggregates and organizes every kind of data, including patient demographics, charges, diagnoses, volume statistics and collections.
The scope of the statistics is much more powerful than an old school manual report. BI analytics are like a crystal data ball, forecasting your practice’s future through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you set based on your business goals. The best business intelligence systems assimilate with your existing practice management software, automatically extracting and analyzing existing data.
With so much money misspent annually in the medical industry, it’s highly likely that if you’re not investing in comprehensive, efficient data accrual and evaluation, you’re losing money. Don’t wait until you are up against a wall. Now is the best time to upgrade, while your practice is prospering.
The Institute of Medicine says that by the year 2020, 90 percent of clinical decisions will be supported by accurate, timely, and up-to-date clinical information, and will reflect the best available evidence. Clinical intelligence, combined with the practice’s operational data, results in valuable business intelligence, assisting both the practice and its outside partners.
This article was originally published in the Velocity blog and is republished here with permission.