How are Different Types of Data Used in the Healthcare Industry?

The healthcare industry collects, processes, and analyzes so many different types of data. Everything from claim data, electronic health records, administrative data, medical records, clinical trial, research data, and so much more is collected every day and stored to be reviewed, analyzed, and referenced for many reasons.

This much healthcare data requires a lot of data storage, security, and automation to more efficiently handle it. So, how is all of this critical data used? 

Utilization Methods of Healthcare Data

Many businesses utilize data analytics to analyze how their business is doing, check on market trends, improve business operations, and determine where to put their marketing efforts. Here are a few ways medical and healthcare administrative data is used to improve and drive change in the healthcare industry.

Predictive Analytics

Utilizing healthcare data for analysis is, in itself, predictive as it’s used to help improve future practices and processes. For healthcare providers specifically, it can be used to constantly improve the delivery of care to patients.

By analyzing these health records, healthcare professionals and researchers can help predict public health trends, including how patients may react to certain treatments and even predict the likelihood of oncoming viruses and pandemics. 

Personnel Management

Data collection of personnel entering healthcare facilities is critical to ensure proper staffing and availability for services. This can determine how many people visit per year, month, week, day, and determine peak times, peak days of the week, and other trends that allow them to better plan for people entering their establishment. 

It is quite common for healthcare facilities to be short-staffed or at times over-staffed. Either way can have a negative effect on how patients are cared for. Improper management can have damaging effects on the patient experience and ultimately can be the reason you lose patients. 

Fraud Prevention

Insurance and claims fraud is a major threat within the healthcare industry, and data-driven analysis can help develop ways to catch fraud as well as prevent it before it happens.

Electronic Health Records

Electronic health records (EHRs) are the largest application of data collection and storage across the healthcare industry. They have been critical to improving patient care, accessibility to information, better diagnoses, and overall efficiency.

These records are able to be shared across different healthcare settings, allowing both patients and physicians to have full transparency to their data in a secure format. They also remove some of the strain that manual processes can cause when using paper records. 

Research Development

The use of clinical data has also been a critical tool in making major advancements in medical research. It has been helpful for things such as disease management as well as improving the effectiveness of certain cancer treatments. With research and analysis, healthcare professionals hope to understand and improve preventatives measures for many diseases and chronic issues for future patients. 

These are just a few of the essential areas in healthcare that rely on using and analyzing data to better their processes to provide the best and most efficient care to patients. Healthcare organizations are using solutions such as integrated high-quality data mining, healthcare analytics, and data standardization to assist with this. Smart Data Solutions can play a part in that journey with our advanced data capture services and machine learning capabilities. To learn more, contact us for a consultation.