Boosting the Immunity of Healthcare Businesses With Smart Analytics

“Machine learning and data analytics are going to play an important role in understanding the spread of (COVID-19), as well as the effectiveness of our response.”

– Director of Product Management, Google Cloud

Along with challenges, a crisis also brings opportunities.

The same applies to the pandemic we are currently trying to contain, and ultimately defeat.

While COVID-19 is putting massive strain on the global healthcare system, it is also driving innovation in healthcare.

And while healthcare lags behind other major sectors in leveraging data, cutting-edge analytics tools can help you deliver improved patient care.

In this blog post, we take a look at how you can make the most of the challenges and opportunities in healthcare to deliver on patient and business success.

Challenges in the healthcare industry

First, let’s take a look at the challenges that providers face.

Most healthcare organizations haven’t integrated analytics into regular operations.

In fact, 56 percent of hospitals don’t have a strategy for data governance or analytics.

In addition to this, data in healthcare is split into various entities and formats.

This makes it difficult for businesses to build a detailed database in order to get actionable insights from data.

Furthermore, this increases the costs involved in making use of data, even when it is on record in some form.

Another challenge that healthcare providers face is that of data quality.

In fact, their ability to make informed decisions depends on the extent to which they can make quality data available and utilize it.

Moreover, information exchange amongst healthcare systems and staff is not exactly seamless.

In addition to this, the industry faces a shortage of skilled workers who can fill these gaps.

Creating opportunities in healthcare with analytics

In spite of these challenges, COVID-19 is driving innovation in virtual healthcare.

This includes cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), teleradiology, telemedicine, remote patient visits, as well as virtual visits.

In fact, the growth rate for the telehealth market is projected to increase by 100 percent in 2020, as compared to pre-COVID estimates.

Healthcare organizations are now using advanced big analytics tools to reduce the impact of COVID-19, understand its nature, as well as protect the most vulnerable.

Providers are leveraging data visualization to track the outbreak of the pandemic, raise awareness, and to help stop its spread.

In addition to this, healthcare organizations are monitoring data on hospital utilization, as well as capacity rates, to help increase awareness about places with low capacity rates.

Healthcare institutions are also making use of real-world data to help design modeling tools.

These tools enable healthcare providers to plan for an upswing in critical care.

As the global situation evolves rapidly, healthcare leaders are likely to increasingly make use of real-world data regarding important decisions aimed at minimizing the impact of COVID-19.

In fact, the ability to learn from past and current real-world data will have a major impact on our ability to track, control, and understand the pandemic.

Moreover, newer ways of collecting, sharing, and evaluating data are likely to extend beyond COVID-19.

In addition to this, researchers are likely to transform patient care and prepare against future crises with improved data quality, expanded collaboration, and speedier analysis.

Wrapping up

In this blog post, we looked at the challenges and opportunities that healthcare presents.

With smart analytics, you can extract highly actionable insights from data to make informed decisions.

Boost the Immunity of Your Healthcare Business With Smart Analytics!