In a recent article by
CIO, the volume of healthcare data at the end of 2013 was estimated at just over 150 exabytes, and it is expected to climb north of 2,300 exabytes by 2020—a growth rate of 1,500% in just seven years.
In response, both healthcare payers and providers are increasing their investments in technology and infrastructure to establish competitive advantages by making sense of the growing pool of data. But key actionable insights—such as how to improve the quality of patient care, increase operational efficiency or refine revenue cycle management—are difficult to find. Core challenges surrounding data analytics (capturing, cleaning, analyzing and reporting) are complex and daunting tasks, both from a technical and subject matter perspective.
It's no surprise, then, that many healthcare organizations struggle to make sense of this data. While the advent of big data technologies, such as Hadoop, provide the tools to collect and store this data, they aren't a magic bullet to translate these heaps of information into actionable business insights. To do so, organizations must carefully plan infrastructure, software and human capital to support analysis on this scale, which can quickly prove to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
But, by starting small in the new era of big data, healthcare organizations are able to create an agile and responsive environment to analyze data—without assuming any unnecessary risk. To do so, however, they must be able to answer three questions:
- What narrowly tailored problem has a short-term business case we can solve?
- How can we reduce the complexity of the analysis without sacrificing results?
- Do we truly understand the data? And, if not, what can we learn from the results?
To illustrate the effectiveness of starting small, consider two examples: that of a healthcare services provider looking to prevent unnecessary hospital visits and that of a large healthcare provider looking to universally improve revenue cycle operations after a three-practice merger.
The first example concerns an organization that specializes in care coordination. This particular organization consumes a sizeable volume of claims—often more than five million a month. And to supplement core operations (e.g. patient scheduling and post-visit follow-ups), it sought to answer a question that could carry significant value to both payers and providers: How can we reduce the number of unnecessary hospital visits? By digging even further, there was a more-refined question from payer and provider clients: Can we identify patients who are at a high risk for a return visit to the ER? Last, but not least, the organization eventually asked the key question many such big data projects fail to ask: Is there a short-term business case for solving this problem?
To answer the question, the organization considered all available data. Although the entire patient population would provide a significant sample size, it could potentially be skewed by various factors relating to income, payer mix, etc. So the organization decided to narrow the search to a few geographically grouped facilities and use this sample as a proof of concept. This would not only limit the volume of data analyzed but would also reduce the complexity of the analysis because it does not require more advanced concepts of control groups and population segmentation. The approach may also allow, if necessary, subject matter experts to weigh in from the individual facilities to provide guidance on the analysis.
The results returned from the analysis were simple and actionable. The service provider found that particular discharge diagnoses have comparatively high rates of return visits to the ER, often related to patients not closely following discharge instructions. And by providing the payers and providers this information, the service provider was able to improve the clarity of discharge instructions and drive post-discharge follow-ups to decrease the total number of unnecessary readmissions. The cost of unnecessary admissions was significant enough to grant further momentum to the small data project, allowing the project to expand to other regions.
In the second example (a large, regional healthcare services provider looking to improve revenue cycle operations), a similarly tailored question was posed: How can we improve revenue cycle efficiency by reducing penalties related to patient overpayments? At first glance, this seems to be a relatively small insight for traditional revenue cycle analyses. Questions that could potentially have a larger impact (Who owes me money now? Which payer pays the best rates for procedure XYZ?), could provide a larger payoff, but they would inevitably complicate the task of standardizing and streamlining data and definitions for all three practice groups.
However, the analysis would provide a jumping off point that would improve understanding of the data at a granular level. Not only was this regional provider able to create reports to identify delayed payments and prioritize accounts by the "age" of the delayed payment, it was able to better understand the underlying cause of the delayed payments. It was then able to adjust the billing process to ensure timely payments. Once again, timely payments significantly helped the working capital requirements of the organization by proving a rather short-term and significant business case. As a result, the small data project was expanded to include more complex revenue cycle management problems related to underpayment and claims related to specialty practices.
In both examples, the organizations deliberately started small—both in terms of the amount of data and the complexity of their approach. And by showing restraint and limiting the scope of their analyses, they were able to define a clear business case, derive actionable insights and gain momentum to tackle larger challenges faced by the organization.
