New England Systems Meets the Healthcare Challenge: Improve Patient Care & Operational Efficiency with Analytics

By Katy Dallas at New England Systems, an IBM Premier Business Partner
Originally published at NESystems.com on December 5th, 2012

With the explosion of data in every industry today, healthcare is no exception.  In fact, the new healthcare regulations require these organizations to harness their data to streamline costs, operations, and ultimately to lead to better patient care.   As a matter of fact, their “lives” may depend on it, since hospitals that fail to meet this challenge will lose some percentage of their federal funding.

The basis for these new regulations lies with the recent Supreme Court decision upholding The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which mandates that healthcare providers develop or upgrade their clinical and financial data marts and integrate them more closely with EMRs.  Further, the ACA states that healthcare provider reimbursements will be tied to quality metrics in accordance with the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model.

ACA compliance and establishing ACO improvement measurements can seem like an overwhelming process. However, small steps can achieve lasting, scalable results.  NES’s experience has been that the best way for healthcare providers to begin the journey to analytics is to first determine:

• What data is available
• The quality of that data
• An area of the organization to be targeted first
• Well-defined goal/s.

Through NES’s Analytics Health Check we can help answer these questions to determine a provider’s readiness for analytics. Once we have a clear understanding of the environment and goals, using thoughtful selection and the best analytics technologies, NES will develop an “Analytics Blueprint” specific to your organization. The approach will describe what it will take to get you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. Choosing a scalable, flexible solution approach will allow you to leverage the architecture created for one department, and as priorities dictate, expand it across the entire organization.

For more information on the Analytics Challenge for Healthcare, please download NES's datasheet on the latest regulations and the NES/IBM approach to managing data and using analytics to meet this challenge.

Healthcare Analytics Datasheet