The hospital standards are based on patient care, flawless cure, and continued patient assistance, even after dispersal. Nowadays, people are aware enough to research the hospital facilities, services, and qualities before making any visit to the hospital.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in 2007 came up with the Triple Aim framework, which includes quality health outcomes, per capita cost reduction, and patient experiences. This was expected to provide a benchmark for quality care with reduced cost and continued assistance to the patients, to the hospitals. But, binding to the framework is a tricky task for the hospitals.
With the advent of Analytics, adhering to the Triple Aim framework has simplified. Enhanced care, better management, and distance patient monitoring with reduced cost are no longer a hard nut to crack.
Let’s see how Analytics made all this possible!
Reduction in Cost
Many factors leads to a hike in prices for hospital services and facilities. The difference in the prices for the same processes at different places is found to be different. Analytics can help in collecting data across multiple hospitals and put it into analysis to mark out the ones that lie beyond the obvious range in price.
Also, high-quality services and lower costs could be ensured by benchmarking the corresponding prices and the services’ quality standards.
Often vendors sell the equipment to the hospitals at a higher-than-usual price, which are unnecessary losses for the hospitals. These can be efficiently reduced using Analytics by keeping an eye over all the processes and purchases.
The hours of operation of a resource can greatly affect its costs. Analytics can be used here to accurately monitor the resource vs operation time data, to analyze, figure out, and obtain the expenses, waste costs, and other valuable insights.
Every year the hospitals are revenue loss-stroked by many of those appointments that are canceled or left unvisited. Analytics can assist in planning the schedules, and help the hospitals to minimize the losses.
Using past appointment data and patient visit histories, Analytics can be used to frame a model which can help in modernizing the appointment registration process by analyzing and making before-hand predictions of the likelihood of a patient to cancel or not show up for the appointment. The hospitals can utilize the valuable data in making necessary plans that could efficiently meet the losses made by the unvisited appointments.
Quality and Outcome
How about the patients being made aware of any forthcoming severe health condition, beforehand?
Well, Analytics can make this turn into reality. Analytics can be used to collect standard attack-met patients’ data (maybe from the internet) for the fluctuating or above/below-the-normal body parameters, just before the conditions went severe. These can then be used for comparison with the present patient’s body parameters multiple times (frequency can be altered), and if the parameters are found to be similar to the standard ones, the patient can be warned of a future severity at a very early stage, so that he/she can make timed appointments with the doctor.
To ensure enhanced care and 24 * 7 monitoring of the patients, care portals can be built utilizing Analytics. Every patients’ body parameters, viz, his/her heartbeat, blood pressure, blood sugar level, etc. can be fed into these portals, and updated frequently for the doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff to be able to monitor their patients, even from a distance. The patient and his family members can also keep an eye over his health and upon noting any fluctuating parameter, necessary visits to the hospitals can be scheduled, without being in a haste.
The mortality and natality rates, hospital-acquired infections, avoidable circumstances, and safety and sanity measures can be monitored by the stakeholders using the platforms which are woven around Analytics. The avoidable conditions include bedsores, vein blockages leading to hindered fluid transfusion through veins, injuries, etc.
Care Experience
Hospitals are inclined towards satisfying their customers. More the customer satisfaction, the higher the growth of the hospitals.
If the doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff communicate inefficiently, behave poorly, or don’t give adequate time to the patients, this could be added as a black spot against the hospital’s name. The reason for this inappropriate behavior by the hospital members could be many. The lack of enthusiasm or engagement among the members could be due to factors like immense workload, overtime working, insufficient pay, and much more. Analytics can be used to surveillance the root-cause which is producing such low enthusiasm and customer dissatisfaction.
Patients tend to forget the medicine dosages, sanitization practices, wound-dressing frequency, and many other important explanations provided by the doctors. There could be designed special portals, which can hold this information, along with the options for the doctors to upload and share other prescriptions to the patients, if necessary.
Analytics can be used to monitor the two important factors which are directly responsible for the patients’ pain management – silence and hygiene. Along with these two other factors which lead to patient satisfaction are room size, comfortable sitting/lying down postures, bed heights, number of patients accommodated in a room, surgical errors, etc. All of these could be easily monitored and checked using Analytics.