Mr. Journo
Home Health And Fitness Data Analytics in Healthcare: 5 Major Challenges & Solutions
Health And Fitness

Data Analytics in Healthcare: 5 Major Challenges & Solutions

by Davinci Davinci - 22 Jun 2022, Wednesday 238 Views Like (0)
Data Analytics in Healthcare: 5 Major Challenges & Solutions

Data analytics in healthcare help analyze raw statistics to detect trends, make conclusions, and suggest areas for improvement. Healthcare analytics uses current and historical data to provide macro and micro insights.

Data analytics helps in decision-making at both the patient and corporate levels. With health data analytics, improvements in patient care, quicker and more accurate diagnoses, and preventative measures are all possible. 

It may save expenses, streamline internal procedures, and more at the corporate level. So, let’s cover more data analytics in healthcare with their challenges and solutions. 

What are data analytics in healthcare?

Healthcare organizations generate a lot of data, but it has a hard time turning it into insights that enhance patient outcomes and operational efficiency. 

Data analytics in healthcare aims to assist clinicians in overcoming barriers to the widespread use of data-derived intelligence by making healthcare data more accessible to colleagues and external partners. 

It provides real-time, reliable data-driven projections that enable healthcare providers to adapt to changing healthcare markets and settings swiftly. Data integration in healthcare is necessary so that users and applications have access to complete and comprehensive data.

Healthcare companies may improve data cooperation and creativity to turn analytics-ready data into business-ready information by automating low-impact data management operations.

What is the importance of healthcare data analytics?

In recent years, data collecting in healthcare settings has grown more simplified. As a result, the data can be used to enhance day-to-day operations and patient care. But it can also utilize to better forecast outcomes. 

Instead of merely looking at historical or current data, we may use both databases to analyze patterns and make predictions. For example, if hospitalization is required, data analytics can assist clinicians in predicting infection, worsening, and readmission risks. 

Types of Health Care Analytics:

  • Descriptive Analytics: 

Descriptive analytics compares or discovers trends using historical data. This type of study is best used to answer questions about what has already occurred. We can learn about the past through descriptive analytics.

  • Predictive Analytics: 

Predictive analytics makes forecasts based on current and historical data. This type of analysis generates ideal models for answering questions about what could happen next. 

  • Prescriptive Analytics: 

Prescriptive analytics is used to forecast future consequences. In this form of analytics, machine learning plays a significant role. 

The information offered can help you decide on the best course of action. We can determine what steps should be followed to achieve the best result with prescriptive analytics.

Challenges and their solutions to data analytics in healthcare:

  • Capturing Accurate Data: 

Data on healthcare is compiled from various sources and in various formats, including structured data, images, videos, paper, digital, multimedia, etc. 

Organizations face a major problem in capturing clean, correct, complete, and prepared data for usage in various frameworks.

Data is collected by providers, public health professionals, employers, payers, social network groups, and patients, but little attempt is made to link the data. As a result, an erroneous picture of a patient's health journey emerges.

Solution: 

Patient journey dashboards and illness trajectories may be created using predictive analytics, resulting in effective and result-driven healthcare. It improves therapy delivery, lowers costs, and increases efficiency, among other things. 

To do so, make sure you have access to data that is clean, scaled, structured, and of high quality from both external and internal sources. 

Providers may enhance their data capture plans by grouping critical data types for individual projects. It ensures that the data is relevant for downstream analytics.

  • Fragmented Patient Care:

The majority of data acquired from various sources is unstructured and unexplored; another problem is making EHR systems more inventive and interoperable. 

Patients, staff, billing, and performance information must be kept safe. Miscommunication during care transitions is responsible for around 80% of significant medical mishaps.

Updates on patients' vital signs, for example, may frequently occur in particular datasets. However, other information, such as a person's domicile or marital status, may only change a few times over their lifetime. 

To minimize end-user downtime and harm to the dataset's quality, providers must clearly understand which updates require manual and automatic intervention.

Solution:

To deliver consistent experiences, AI and machine learning algorithms require accurate data free of duplications and errors. 

It allows physicians to obtain anticipated real-time data that appear to be pertinent to the patient's medical history. And as a result, the appropriate treatment is suggested for them.

HCOs should rule out data governance and master data management systems to improve data quality. Instead, they should form interdisciplinary groups to free their chains' healthcare services, systems, and professionals.

  • Data Privacy & Security:

Healthcare data was often exposed to vulnerabilities, ranging from phishing attacks to malware to computers accidentally left in a cab.

HIPAA specifies nearly 18 PHI components that must protect. The major problem is to remove these fundamental PHI components while still keeping data useful for analysis. 

The HIPAA Security Rule includes a set of specific security measures for enterprises that store protected health information (PHI), such as authentication methods, transmission security, access restrictions, and audits, among others.

Solution:

Cloud data lakes simplify healthcare businesses to analyze data from various sources. However, the HIPAA also mentions a few safeguards that enterprises must adhere to to ensure privacy and security. 

A proper balance must strike between data privacy and patient data for creation analysis.

  • Data visualization: 

Data must regular graphically shown in interactive graphs or charts to be strong and understanding.

And we understand how inconvenient and time-consuming it is to bring data from several sources into a reporting tool. As a result, clear and engaging data visualization might simplify a provider's digestion and use of information. 

Color coding is a common data visualization approach that usually gets a quick response. For example, stop, alert, and go is understood as red, yellow, and green.

Solution:

Data visualization brings the most important lessons from the health business into sharper focus. It aids in the identification of patterns and correlations and makes data analysis more relevant. 

Data visualizations include interactive graphical dashboards, bar charts, pie charts, heat maps, and histograms. For example, each of which has a specific purpose in representing ideas and data. intelyConnect offers a no-code and low-code approach to healthcare data integration and interoperability. 

  • Document Processing and Analysis:

While many businesses choose on-premise data storage because it gives them control over security, access, and uptime, they find it costly to maintain and are more likely to create data silos among departments.

Clinical papers with complex terminology, ranging from healthcare administrative data to patient records with prescriptions, take time to review and process. 

Capturing, monitoring, and keeping PD, Fs, word files, and digital photographs of paper-based material. As a result, developing a platform that can handle clinical records without mistakes is difficult.

Solution:

Organizations may save time and money by using digital document management. It comes with a solution that includes document security, access control, audit trails, centralized storage, and structured search. 

HCOs are aided in data processing by emerging machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) approaches.

Conclusion:                                

In healthcare, data analytics has a promising future. All you have to do now is deal with the obstacles while utilizing data analytics and figuring out how to overcome them. 

As a result of giving high-quality treatment to your patients, your practice will flourish.

At intelyConnect, we assist hospitals, clinics, and health centers install cloud-based and other advanced health IT solutions to enable them. As a result, they provide better healthcare to their patients while improving the practice workflow process.