Want to Build a Healthcare Analytics Center of Excellence? Start with the Right Technology

Payer organizations all over the country – from large national companies to small firms – struggle with a seemingly endless volume of member data, and only limited tools that translate the information into usable analytics insights. Legacy analytics software built for a fee-for-service world falls short of the capabilities to deliver member-centric, actionable steps that will improve care and lower costs in value-based care (VBC) programs. 

But the right technology, designed for a value-based world, can translate to a very real competitive advantage, and a healthier member population for payers of all types and sizes. 

Step 1: Minimize Manual Work 

At the center of many inefficient analytics software is an inability to automate many of the data ingestion, normalization, and analysis. Organizations with legacy software often must assign the task of manually transferring data in and out of analytics, and manually intervening to clean up messy or unstructured data so it’s usable within the application.  

On the other end, the same organizations may have serious challenges pulling information for reports – including mandatory compliance reports from organizations like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  

When you can streamline these activities, and your analytics software can do much of this work without the need for manual intervention, staff time is freed up to perform more important tasks that contribute to better member health and lower costs. Additionally, when your analytics tools are running on clean, normalized, and harmonized data, it ensures that your organization, and your provider partners, can make the best decisions about what your population needs. 

Step 2: Enrich the Data 

As noted, the sheer volume of healthcare data available today is both incredible and challenging. The ability to harness all of that information into a usable analytics tools can dramatically improve care. But since it comes from disparate systems, most organizations lack the tools to effectively analyze it.  

To improve care quality and cost efficiency, payers need more than just standardized datasets. They also need enriched data. That means adding information like groupers, risk scores, benchmarks, and quality metrics to raw data, all of which can improve your ability to spot critical trends (both positive and negative), and translate analytics insights into actionable steps for care teams in VBC arrangements. 

Step 3: Simplify Sharing Your Data 

Once you have a single source of truth for clean, harmonized data, and the ability to analyze enriched data to produce meaningful insights, the final step is making it easy to extract data for sharing and reporting. Automated reporting tools – including a library of predefined reporting templates that you can easily adjust to meet your needs – remove the manual work of hunting and pecking through various data sources and compiling information. When your analytics software also includes intuitive visual displays and the ability to build reports for all your stakeholders (including high-level overviews for executives and in-depth drill-down details for super users), you facilitate better decision making. 

Embrace Your Data 

Healthcare is increasingly a data-driven profession. When payers can ingest, analyze, and share all of the available member information, they are prepared to succeed in a value-based care future. Learn more.