Physician Data Analytics – Impact on the Future

Last month, I reported on a specific physician practice group that used analytics to improve efficiency and reduce operational expenses. This month as we move into 2015, I would like to discuss some ideas of how physician analytics can impact your future.

Market Changes Driving the Future
As reported in a recent white paper (Healthcare Analytics: The Way Forward, by Litt, et.al. November 2013, Dell Inc.), there are several significant market changes that will have an impact on your practice including:
• Aging baby boomers that will require healthcare for more years than in the past,
• Increasing percentage of older patients requiring more expensive treatments,
• Increasing long-term care for chronic diseases,
• Increasing pharmaceutical prices, and
• Ballooning costs of care.



In addition, it is becoming a strong necessity (if not a requirement) to use an electronic health record (EHR) in your practice in order to manage all the tracking and reporting changes associated with these market drivers and other government requirements.

Impact on Your Practice
In order to prepare your practice for the future, you will need to focus on having healthcare analytics as an organizational capability. This means that analytics will become the key future driver for your practice group to thrive in the future.

Several components are necessary to add analytics capabilities to your practice including:
• Having formal data and information governance,
• Having scalable business intelligence and data architecture in place,
• Implementing change management processes within your group – driven by your key physician leaders,
• Mapping strategic quality and care transformation initiatives to your organization and operations.

Overall, this may sound like a daunting process. So, “Why bother?”

In reality, you can move your practice to an analytics driven organization by taking one simple clinical variable (like asking about smoking and documenting the answer, or tracking the BMI of your over-weight patients over time) and having your entire office staff work as a team to improve these variables. By doing something simple and easy, and then changing the practice workflows to maximize your results, you can then move into more complex data collection and analysis for some of the high cost, chronic diseases with multiple co-morbidities. By doing so, your practice will, indeed, be prepared for the future!