What are the top healthcare analytics solutions for identifying cost-saving opportunities?

In my experience, several top healthcare analytics solutions excel in identifying cost-saving opportunities through predictive analytics. Among them, Optum Analytics stands out for its comprehensive predictive modeling capabilities, enabling healthcare organizations to forecast future trends related to resource utilization, patient outcomes, and operational efficiency. This allows for proactive identification of cost-saving opportunities such as reducing unnecessary hospital readmissions, optimizing supply chain management, and improving care coordination.

Cost cutting should come in the form of seeking ways to become much more efficient in getting to the right decision but that process cannot come at the cost of the quality of the decision. It is about how to decrease the internal cost to deliver care. If someone wanted to look at areas to cut cost you would want to establish acceptable performance metrics to reach an outcome. It could be how much labor cost is appropriate to deliver care, it could be throughput measurements for the Emergency Department or Operating Units, it could be establishing a desired length of stay for certain conditions. First want to identify your baseline and target and identify what are the inefficiencies in the current approach that limits the achievable target.

Health informatics is a field at the intersection of healthcare, information technology, and data science. In my experience, it focuses on the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of healthcare information to support clinical decision-making, improve patient outcomes, and streamline healthcare delivery processes. Health informatics encompasses a wide range of applications, including electronic health records (EHRs), clinical decision support systems, telemedicine, health information exchange (HIE), and healthcare analytics. In recent years, health informatics has become increasingly important as healthcare systems worldwide digitize their operations and generate vast amounts of data.

Establish clear metrics and baselines: whether labor costs per patient, throughput times for emergency or surgery departments, ALOS for various conditions, or quality metrics. Consider Activity-Based Costing: this can give you a detailed understanding of exactly where costs are incurred so that you can decide and implement changes to care models or processes that still allow you to achieve quality but in a more cost-effective way. Analyze and redefine these processes: achieving cost-savings comes from iterating on the workflows you put in place. The first phase is leveraging everyone’s best guesses and intentions but iterations must take place when the workflow implications of the new workflow is put into effect.