Advanced and sophisticated information technology for processing complex big data assists healthcare providers with valuable tools towards the betterment of the medical practice. Health analytics offer a multidimensional analysis and insight into patient and medical data.
The results obtained help healthcare providers and practitioners make better and more informed decisions regarding the health of the population. Health data analytics improves performance and risk management, outcomes, clinical decision support, acute and long-term care, chronic disease management, preventive medicine, quality of healthcare, population health, and reduce costs of healthcare delivery.
The selection and implementation of the best health analytics solution must be carefully done. This represents a challenge for most healthcare providers since the amount of solutions on the market is quite wide. It is recommended that healthcare providers take some time to try demos and assess platforms which offer the necessary functions for processing the healthcare data.
In many cases, healthcare providers underutilize, or even ignore the potential of software offered by global leader providers of prescriptive analytics and integrated business planning (IBP) such as River Logic, This represents a huge problem since healthcare providers don't understand what things cost, and prescriptive analytics and healthcare optimization can, indeed, directly assess this kind of challenge.
River Logic was recently named by Gartner Inc. as one of seven major optimization software platforms in its Market Guide to Optimization Solutions. Gartner defines optimization as "a type of prescriptive analytics that finds the best solution from a set of feasible solutions using a mathematical algorithm that maximizes, or minimizes a specified objective function subject to constraints."
Optimization platforms are defined by Gartner as "application design and authoring environments that allow skilled users to specify an optimization problem, design and run scenarios, and create a wide range of optimization applications." According to Gartner, by 2018 optimization will become a best practice for leading organizations to address a wide range of complex business decisions.
Some of the key functions these solutions should include: Availability, continuity, ease of use, scalability, ability to manipulate at different levels of granularity, quality assurance, privacy, security, and they need to be user-friendly.To be useful, health data collection and processing need to be analyzed in real-time.
Healthcare providers must first respond to patient needs. However, they also have to focus on their profitability and work towards improving their success. One big question is if they should adopt a predictive analytics or prescriptive analytics solution. In a nutshell, predictive analytics describes what will happen by emphasizing in the use of information looking at past performance. In healthcare, this is not enough.
Prescriptive analytics, on the other hand, plays a wider, more complete and efficient role when medical problems involve too many alternatives, and predictive analytics is insufficient. Prescriptive analytics include health and medical knowledge as well as information. It addresses the question of what should happen rather than what will happen.
Prescriptive analytics is, therefore, the best choice for areas of healthcare such as drug prescriptions and treatment alternatives. Using prescriptive analytics also allows healthcare providers to offer personalized medicine and evidence-based medicine, which are both of paramount importance in the treatments of conditions such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.
Healthcare transformation involves a commitment to change. Adoption of the latest health data analytics and best practices available on the market guide healthcare providers along the path to achieve healthcare excellence. Prescriptive analytics and optimization solutions lead healthcare providers to become part of the next generation healthcare.
The author of this post, Susan Fourtané, is not associated with River Logic.