Saturday: BI in healthcare; not one, not two, but three summits.

What is BI? BI refers to the processes and technologies used to obtain timely, valuable insights into business and data. In healthcare, it is integrating, organizing, and analyzing data from a variety of sources can help health care organizations develop more fact-based, data-driven answers to important questions, rather than relying on intuition. Fundamentally, BI and analytics help turn raw data into informed decisions.

Does BI service looks only at the current-time data?

No, the time perspective for BI insights can be historical, concurrent, or prospective.

Turning data into informed decisions, the three Summits of BI

The processes and technologies utilized by BI to analyze structured data can be segmented into three levels: Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive.

1) Descriptive analytics analyze the past. Most of what is traditionally referred to as BI falls into this category. This level of BI answers questions such as: How many readmissions occurred? How did it break down by condition, by facility?, etc..

Descriptive BI can enable health care organizations to analyze the cost of care, compare the performance of physicians,and identify the most profitable lines of business

2) Predictive analytics

Predict the future. Predictive analytics are common in the area of claims and risk projection. This level of BI answers questions such as: How many re-admissions can I expect from this population? and so forth.

Predictive BI can identify patients at risk for long stays, noncompliance with discharge instructions, readmission, and other undesirable outcomes.

3) Prescriptive analytics

Aim to tell us what we should do. These models recommend or directly decide on a specific action to optimize an outcome. Prescriptive analytics have limited deployment in health care today, but have disrupted other industries. Prescriptive analytics can answer questions such as: Which post-acute facility is likely to deliver the best cost, quality, and experience outcomes for a patient

Prescriptive BI can help automate scheduling or inventory levels, or provide cognitive support for physicians when determining diagnostic or therapeutic approaches for patients with multiple chronic conditions.

Raw data is just useless

• BI makes data actionable. The rapid uptake of EHRs has dramatically expanded the universe of data that health systems have for analysis. Also, biomedical devices, patient-supplied data, and new diagnostic technologies are bringing new types of data into the system. That raw data alone does not provide value; it needs to be turned into actionable information.
• BI ensures greater preparedness for future business changes. BI can power a health care organization’s transformation by modeling future performance and identifying the interventions that can move to meet desired results. BI can provide a thorough understanding of where an organization is today and a focused view of where it can be in the future.