Using a business intelligence process will help your medical facility glean actionable insights from your data. Here are 7 steps CCD Health has used.
Every medical center contains and collects a large amount of data. This data is then used to shed insights on how your facility is operating—what’s working and what’s not. However, in order to effectively use these insights, you have to view them in an organized, actionable way. Not every medical center has its data organized as such, which can make it difficult to pinpoint opportunities and make data-driven decisions.
This is where developing a successful business intelligence (BI) plan comes into play. As your facility continues to collect data, you’ll be able to meet your objectives and operate more efficiently—all while ensuring quality patient experience and increased satisfaction.
This blog will show you the seven steps for Business Intelligence that CCD Health uses with our clients to drive results.
Before we begin our successful BI process, let’s examine business intelligence as a whole. BI is a technology-driven process that analyzes and transforms data into actionable information. This information helps businesses make strategic and tactical decisions to enhance financial results.
Business intelligence represents a wide range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest access to insights about an organization based on the available data. These tools can access and analyze datasets and present their analytical findings in summaries, graphs, and charts that will help you determine the state of your business and make decisions to scale its growth.
Knowing this, let’s look at how CCD Health’s process occurs and the benefits our clients see from this help.
A mistake many medical facilities make is not assessing their current needs and goals before they view the data.
For a successful BI plan, the very first step is to identify the use case based on market needs through interactions with clients as well as market expertise.
Do this by spending time with your team, getting to know individual pain points and your most pressing needs based on your facility and your market. Look through your current tools, take a measure of your current patient satisfaction, and conduct a thorough check-up on your operation’s health.
After you’ve spent time identifying issues or pain points, come up with your best hypothesis to help find the root of your problems. Additionally, take a look at how these problems might affect future business and potential issues.
By hypothesizing current and potential issues and problems, it makes it easier for everyone involved to see tangible solutions based on your needs. For example, if you realize that patient scheduling consistently causes issues with patient satisfaction, you can reasonably form the hypothesis linking the two of them, and examine potential solutions.
The next thing you need to do is identify data points that will support testing the hypothesis, as well as its underlying drivers.
Your hypothesis needs to be backed up with data, not just a gut feeling. This step of the process is crucial to your business intelligence approach. You need to make sure that you have plenty of measurable data points to support the hypothesis and help identify underlying problems.
This will give you a frame of reference when you start looking through your medical facility’s data. You will be able to create a big picture as you find supporting evidence for the hypothesis.
To go back to the scheduling example in step 2, you would identify data points such as staff schedules, call volume, and average time before answering calls to support the hypothesis that patient scheduling is affecting satisfaction.
After you’ve identified the data points that are important to the hypothesis, it’s time to dig into your data and look for patterns.
In this step, you will collect data from these data points using automated and manual tools, such as your telephony platform, RIS System, CRM, or even spreadsheets.
Look through all your existing data for patterns and supporting evidence that your hypothesis is on the right track. To do this, you’ll need to apply statistical techniques and Machine Learning Algorithms to help you identify such patterns in your data.
During this process, you might uncover evidence for or against your hypothesis, and adjust your analysis accordingly, which leads us to the next step.
Once you’ve tested your hypothesis, and analyzed all the necessary data, draw preliminary conclusions and come up with additional hypotheses as necessary.
This is where you’ll look at the data to tell a story and see if your initial hypothesis were on the right track or if the data reveals additional information. At this step, you might further hypothesize; after all, the more you uncover, the more thorough your solutions will be.
Once you’ve explored all possible hypotheses relating to your problem, collected the data, and drawn preliminary conclusions, it’s time for the solutions. Come up with a plan that targets all problem areas and will result in favorable outcomes.
Then, present the conclusions and suggested action items to your decision-makers.
The goal here is to lay out your findings and the best possible path to get results. The solutions will be backed by data collected from your facility and include clear key performance indicators (the data you measured in step 4) to track progress.
The last step is implementation. After you’ve implemented the suggested actions, we recommend conditioning to collect data and provide results to your decision-makers on a regular basis.
Continue to monitor the data as you work towards your goals. If you are working with a knowledge provider like CCD Health, you’ll gain both solutions to your problems and proven results with a supportive partner.
Now that you know CCD Health’s steps for a comprehensive and successful business intelligence strategy, here are some possible results and benefits your medical facility could experience:
Sometimes, gaining a competitive edge involves examining your current processes and looking for ways to improve.
With a business intelligence partner like CCD Elevate, you’ll be able to meet your goals and problem-solve efficiently.
CCD Health is the leading medical contact center for outpatient healthcare providers, offering exceptional patient and customer experience. Our business intelligence suite will allow you to receive a fully-fledged Analytics and Workforce Optimization function to drive optimal staffing and customer care without the setup costs and operational burdens.
Contact us to learn more about how our team of experts can help you understand and improve your Patient Experience (CX).
Healthcare is an information-intensive field. Here's how you can optimize your operational workflows with a medical record retrieval system.
Healthcare workforce management solutions will help your practice in a variety of ways, including an increase in efficiency and resource cost savings.
Bridge the gap between using data and becoming a healthcare data-driven organization ! FREE Webinar