Designing and operationalising a meaningful healthcare analytics strategy

As healthcare continues to experience cost challenges, the industry is faced with the need to more aggressively pursue advanced expense reduction strategies, standardised and redesigned care methodologies, reimbursement models and, ultimately, population health. To execute this, the industry as a whole must begin to apply meaning to the vast amounts of data generated by healthcare providers by advancing methods to normalise and standardise this data from the disparate information systems found in the provider setting. Once this is accomplished providers can deploy a meaningful analytics strategy continuum that builds upon current expense reduction practices. Advanced analytics to allow more strategic management of supply expense should then be enhanced with clinical and other patient-related data to drive sophisticated and appropriate care standardisation and redesign efforts. This analytics strategy continuum will allow healthcare to move towards the more widespread application of Big Data and drive population health goals.