How Data Can Be Used to Make a Smarter Practice
What if I told you that you have the power to predict trends, save lives, and lower costs associated with your healthcare practice? With the recent rapid digitization of patient care, record-keeping, and mandatory regulations to remain within digital compliance, we now have the opportunity to build predictive analysis for healthcare trends.
By finding disease patterns and trends before they become an epidemic, we can improve care, save lives, and lower our overhead costs by a significant amount.
This massive amount of data, known as Big Data, can help practices develop a more insightful and thorough diagnosis. You could identify those whose lifestyle changes or preventative care would benefit them the most before disease progression.
In addition, data can be used for broad-scale disease identification and assist with things like fraud detection and false claims.
Data analysis can help your practice in the following ways:
- Increase the accuracy of diagnosis. This is especially important in critical situations where a patient comes into the ER with chest pain, for example. It is often difficult to decide whether to hospitalize this patient but based on the patient’s condition and answers to questions, data analysis with an accurate and predictive algorithm can help decide whether it’s safe to send a patient home.
- Help preventative medicine and public health. Early intervention is key to prevent or decrease disease patterns.
- Accurately predict insurance product costs. You can use big data to predict future medical costs. This allows the patient to ensure proper insurance coverage. Pharmaceuticals, as well, can use this data to help determine health trends.
- Accurately predict medical trends that you can train for. Knowing the trends that are coming can allow your staff to prepare accordingly.
Big Data can be used to make your practice more efficient and ease the costs and strains on our healthcare system.