Why Predictive Analytics in Health Care Matter More Than Reports

We built the foundation. Now let’s build the skyscraper

In my years overseeing information systems at a major health network, I had a front-row seat to the massive efforts our industry undertook to wrangle our data. And let’s be honest: Health care has incredibly complex datasets. There are electronic medical records (EMRs), billing codes, workforce schedules, supply chain data, and numerous other siloed sources that make even basic descriptive reporting a monumental task. 

Over the last decade, we fixed the foundation. Health systems invested heavily in building enterprise data lakes. It was the right thing to do; you can’t build a skyscraper without a foundation. 

But many organizations are still running reports that only tell us what happened yesterday, last week, or last quarter. We’re driving forward while looking exclusively in the rearview mirror, which is a terrible way to do it. Everyone working in the field already knows that operational needs change constantly. What will relieve the pressure is accurate prediction of those variables.  

I believe the challenge we face is a Catch-22: Financial pressures are greater than ever. If we don’t leverage the investments we already made, we’ll stay stuck in an endless cycle of simply telling you what we did last week. 

Two arenas where predictive data delivers

The real value of our consolidated data assets lies in two major areas of prediction: 

1. Optimizing Operational Flow

Take the crystal ball out of operations and replace it with a model that’s 75 to 80 percent accurate. That level of accuracy would provide a way clearer picture than we have today. 

The single most pressing operational need is staffing, particularly the nursing crisis. We have a limited number of highly skilled professionals servicing a massive demand. We need to put the capacity we have in the right place at the right time. 

We can achieve this through operational predictive analytics. By tying together clinical acuity, patient volumes, length-of-stay data, and even weather patterns, we can predict staffing demand down to the shift level. This alignment of capacity to demand helps evenly distribute the workload, which is a crucial step in battling the burnout epidemic. It’s a nonnegotiable step toward providing high care quality, especially since satisfied nurses statistically deliver better patient outcomes. 

2. Elevating Care: The Power of Precision Medicine

This is the top of the maturity curve, and honestly, the area that truly jazzes me. This is where we move past operational efficiency into life-changing care. 

Precision medicine integrates a patient’s health record, outside procedures, and even their genome sequence. Where operational models can provide great improvement with 75 to 80 percent accuracy, precision medicine has to be far more precise. It’s medicine being performed with data. 

We’re seeing this used most often in oncology settings. Physicians can use data to determine which of the five available treatments for a specific cancer a patient will metabolize better. This kind of intricate care demands the collaboration of highly specialized individuals—geneticists, pharmacy experts, and oncologists—using data to find the best possible path forward. 

My recommendation: Democratize your gold

If you’re an executive looking to make the leap, don’t overthink the next big system purchase. Instead, look at what you already own. 

The first step is foundational, and you’re probably part of the way there: Get your data pulled together and then engineer it so it’s usable for your knowledge workers. The second step is perhaps the most critical: Get the data into the hands of the people who know how to use it. 

You have subject matter experts in every operational area of your hospital. They’re the ones who can walk the halls and connect the dots between a data trend and a real-world reason. If we have all this gold, and we lock it up in a safe, the value remains untapped. 

We have the foundations, we have the gold, and we have the pressure to become more efficient. The time is now to move from describing the past to predicting the future, ensuring both our hospital systems and our patients thrive. 

Ready to move beyond historical reports and harness the power of predictive data to optimize your healthcare operations?

View the Resultant healthcare page to book a meeting with the team.