By allowing hospitals to harness real-time medical data, clinical analytics can improve clinician efficiency and help healthcare organizations decrease costs.
There has been a lot of chatter around clinical analytics in recent years due to the emergence of accountable care organizations, as this type of analytics can help improve many of the vital parts of an ACO, including care coordination and population health.
Clinical analytics can improve care coordination in accountable care relationships by taking disparate healthcare data and translating it into real-time actionable intelligence that physicians can use. Analytics tools can offer care teams a true 360-degree view of a patient's medical profile to enable informed decision-making at the moment of influence. By using clinical analytics, physicians participating in ACOs can "have a more complete discussion with their patients at the point of care, improving the physician-patient relationship and care coordination across the healthcare ecosystem," says Dave Caldwell, executive vice president at Campbell, Calif.-based Certify Data Systems, a subsidiary of Humana.
Physicians can also improve their population health efforts by using clinical analytics to identify gaps in patient care. It is important ACOs' clinical analytics engines have the ability to function in both real-time and batch mode — a method of processing high volumes of data over a period of time — for population analysis. Additionally, prospective analyses can be used to notify ACO care teams of possible interventions to avoid future medical or financial risks, according to Mr. Caldwell.
From a financial perspective, clinical analytics can also help ACOs decrease costs. ACO care teams utilizing clinical analytics decrease costs by using the more complete patient profile to help them avoid adverse drug events and prevent unnecessary tests.
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