With the healthcare industry changing at an alarming pace, data and analytics is taking a starring role in making sense of petabytes and terabytes of unstructured data — from prescriptions, diagnostic tests, patient care records, and insurance claims, that are otherwise locked up in silos. Traditionally, adoption of healthcare analytics in India has always trailed behind industries such as retail, manufacturing and banking.
“India is still considered a developing nation in comparison to the rest of the world with regards to healthcare, particularly on the GDP spending front with only an estimated 1.3-1.5 % contributed annually,” expresses Charlie Farah. “Expectedly, the majority of this spending is allocated on physical services, capital works, staffing, drugs, pathology and other consumables that there is little left to invest into analytics and a business intelligence infrastructure,”shared Farah, Qlik Asia-Pacific market development healthcare and public sector director.
Overview of healthcare analytics in India
As a developing country, India is undertaking significant initiatives to encourage the use of analytics across every sectors and industries, but in healthcare, trends suggest the country has lacked behind in adoption of analytics.Governing bodies and policy makers are gradually acknowledging the potential healthcare analytics proposes in terms of generating insights from clinical, financial and operational data by leveraging visual analytics.
Why is India lagging in healthcare analytics adoption?
Studies indicate only 10 percent IT budget is allocated to the Indian hospitals. Also, some companies find the initial high capital investments of implementing analytics solutions beyond the scope of their budget. Here’s a list of some of the most taxing challenges that healthcare companies have to deal with:
- A dearth of experienced and skilled professionals
- Steep costs usually fall outside the budgetary considerations of smaller companies
- Security poses as one of the biggest challenge, given the fact that integration of analytics also brings copious amount of confidential patient care data into play.
Healthcare Analytics trends to watch out for in?
Trends also point out that the comprehensive onboarding of cost-effective cloud solutions will proliferate the adoption of HMIS and EMRs. This strategy will make healthcare services easily accessible, and ensure swifter response times and patient convenience, besides reducing the scope of errors
According to industry insiders, automation in workforce management, administration, finance, billing, patient records, and pharmacies will make it compulsory to leverage analytics.
The healthcare industry is billed to undergo tectonic changes with the boom of startups that are using clinical data to gain insights into effective patient care. Analytics driven organization can reduce costs, improve patient care and provide a truly patient-centric experience.
Advantages of healthcare analytics
A data driven healthcare organization can work in areas such as clinical operations, research and development, public health, genome study, remote monitoring, evidence-based medicine, and more. Here are few of the most immediate benefits of incorporating analytics into healthcare.
- Extensive and easier collaboration among healthcare systems
- Better insights implicate into better healthcare services
- Diminishing operational expenses
- Patients are facilitated to check their health statistics by themselves
- Processes such as billing and patient registration are improved significantly.
What does the future of healthcare analytics withhold?
Companies are currently investing their efforts towards mining path-breaking insights by analyzing the existing volumes of healthcare and patient data available. The healthcare landscape would benefit significantly from such ventures as it will help in delivering personalized healthcare services swiftly, efficiently and within everyone’s reach. “There is a real buzz around India on the absolute benefits analytics and data discovery can deliver to an organization. Wockhardt Hospitals Ltd., one of India’s leading super-specialty care, deployed the Qlik Platform as a key tool in its journey on establishing a companywide adoption of data analytics,” concludes Charlie.
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