The importance of data analytics for healthcare cannot be overstated, especially after a year in which the entire world was confined to their home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a time of grave crises, Healthcare organizations around the world had to rely on data analytics to accurately identify patterns and trends that enabled everyone from doctors and big pharmaceutical companies to tackle the pandemic. Right from enterprise application to 3-D printing, the healthcare domain has always been an early adopter of cutting-edge technology and one of the most impactful tech advancements in recent times has been the emergence of robust data visualization tools.
The health systems today collect a record-amount of data from various sources. Hospitals collect patient data right from the moment one steps in, diagnostic centers digitally store data of every lab test and pharmaceutical companies too have every piece of information from their trials to the drug discovery. Leveraging this data to create meaningful insights empowers every stakeholder in the healthcare domain and with powerful data analytics and visualization platform; the industry is finally taking full advantage of the immense possibilities that can arise from data-driven stories. Yet, apart from the top healthcare organizations, the domain is to see global adoption of easily available data visualization tools. Let’s take a look at how building actionable stories and insights from data can help stakeholders to overcome hurdles and barriers in the healthcare domain.
Unifying Disparate Data Sources
There’s no denying that the sheer amount of data being collected today is exponentially more than what the numbers indicated a few years ago. One of the hurdles of analyzing the data in traditional form is the fact that this data comes from different sources such as a wearable device, ERP system, and EHR application, and so on. Modern feature-packed data visualization software has the power to unify data from various sources and swiftly turn it into a simple dashboard that empowers all stakeholders involved in the business. Unifying the scattered data and integrating it to the data analytics and visualization platform securely and without any Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) violations
Role-based Visualizations
Democratizing the data facilitates the users to create powerful visual stories by leveraging the data visualization platform that can be configured to curate role-based reports and dashboards. The time spent by physicians, drug researchers, and clinical experts in gathering data manually to unearth the patterns and eye-opening trends can be eliminated if the organization deploys a tool that showcases different stakeholders exactly what they are looking for. In the USA alone, more than 600 million images are scanned by analytics algorithms to help doctors and radiologists swiftly understand the patterns and help in patient diagnosis. Every user in departments such as executive, finance, HR, marketing, etc. has different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and more focused dashboards and insights will enable the stakeholders to make use of the data analytics tool to answer specific questions and tackle important operational issues.
Making Actionable Insights Accessible
Standardizing the design and development of reports and visualizations has tremendous power to enable every user to make the right decisions by leveraging the insights. By making Data visualization software accessible to every critical employee has a great snowball effect in the healthcare organization. Users with little knowledge of data science can easily import the data into the visualization tool to explore and extract and broadcast meaningful insights and dashboards to the team seamlessly. For a hospital specializing in joint replacement surgeries, making use of the data from past surgeries and industry numbers can bring out newer strategies such as standardizing the components of these surgeries. Many of the top data visualization tools are also available as mobile, tablet applications and can be easily integrated with enterprise applications, making it easier for any healthcare business to successfully turn into a data-driven organization.
There is no doubt Big Data has had a great impact on the Healthcare industry and will continue to do so in the upcoming decade. It will be interesting to see what use-cases are adopted by large-scale pharmaceutical and hospital organizations in the USA and Europe as data analytics gets more sophisticated.
