From where I sit in Silicon Valley, I see several factors driving the pace of analytics adoption:
• Emergence of machine learning and analytics tools that can make useful inferences and predictions based on available data.
• More structured and unstructured data that is now available to be processed and analyzed with the adoption of EHRs.
• The positive impact analytics can have on the demands that health systems face to be more efficient and improve clinical outcomes.
• Computing and cloud infrastructure that allows for large quantities of data processing in real time, pushed to the right operational and clinical decision makers at the right time.
• The willingness to adopt new tools by leadership of health systems, many who recognize that new-world data analytics is no longer optional; it’s a must-have for healthcare institutions to survive.
Actionable Analytics Made a Reality
For more than a decade, healthcare organizations invested millions of dollars building data warehouses and armies of data analysts with the sole purpose of making better decisions with data and improving patient outcomes. The historical problem has been that these warehouses and analytics alone aren’t enough because the analytics/reporting /dashboard they provide are not actionable. They just tell you what’s happening, but they cannot explain why it’s happening and what one can do about making the right outcomes occur. Now instead of just understanding “what’s going on,” the infrastructure and technology have come of age to figure out “why” and “what to do about it.”
Operational Efficiency Through Predictive Analytics
Let’s focus on one key area for a deeper dive: enabling healthcare providers to “do more with less.” This is a critical need for hospitals to remain viable because of a number of forces:
• An aging population is increasing the demand for expensive, critical care.
• There is an ever-increasing shortage of qualified physicians, nurses and caregivers.
• The move toward value-based care has increased the need for accountability and transparency.
These forces are turning out to be so strong and powerful that many healthcare organizations are being forced to consolidate, and this trend will continue. Efficiency is therefore at the top of the agenda, and data analytics has an important seat at the table. In fact, hospitals today face the same cost and revenue pressure that retail, transportation and airlines have faced for years. Industries that are asset-intensive and service-based must streamline operations and do more with less.
Healthcare providers can’t keep spending their way out of trouble by investing in more and more infrastructure; instead, they must optimize their use of the assets currently in place. To do this, providers need to consistently make excellent operational decisions through predictive analytics that learn continually and use optimization algorithms and artificial intelligence to deliver prescriptive recommendations throughout the system to administrative and clinical end users.
Sanjeev Agrawal is president and chief marketing officer of LeanTaaS, a Silicon Valley-based innovator of predictive analytics solutions to healthcare’s biggest operational challenges. He works closely with dozens of leading healthcare institutions including Stanford Health Care, UCHealth, NewYork-Presbyterian, Cleveland Clinic, MD Anderson and more. Sanjeev was Google’s first head of product marketing. Since then, he has had leadership roles at three successful startups: CEO of Aloqa, a mobile push platform (acquired by Motorola); VP product and marketing at Tellme Networks (acquired by Microsoft); and as the founding CEO of Collegefeed (acquired by AfterCollege). Sanjeev graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an EECS degree from MIT and along the way spent time at McKinsey & Co. and Cisco Systems. He is an avid squash player and has been named by Becker’s Hospital Review as one of the top entrepreneurs innovating in healthcare. For more information on LeanTaaS, please visit www.leantaas.com and follow the company on Twitter @LeanTaaS, Facebook at www.facebook.com/LeanTaaS and LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/leantaas.
