BI for Healthcare: Prognosis Positive

Every industry stands to benefit from the savvy use of business intelligence, but few have as much at stake as healthcare. Healthcare providers leverage the insights they gain by applying BI tools to traditional financial and operational processes, as well as clinical processes with direct effects on patient health.

With evidence-based insight into such processes, patient protocols, treatment outcomes and disease management across large populations can be improved significantly.

Those objectives are even more critical as providers enter a new era in healthcare delivery — driven by the Affordable Care Act — where volume-driven care based on fee-forservice models gives way to value-driven reimbursement based on outcomes. Providers will increasingly rely on advanced BI and analytics solutions to gain insight into patient, financial and other data to achieve quality of care and cost-efficiency objectives.

Filtering the volumes of data that they and external parties generate, and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time across stakeholder networks, is a growing challenge. Much of the patient data now stored is still paper-based, and digital data tends to be trapped in silos across most organizations.