Research and Markets announces that the global market for advanced analytics totalled $207.4 billion in 2015, and should total nearly $219.3 billion by 2020, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.1%, through 2020. According to them, the advanced analytics market comprises applications for the following industries: banking and financial services, telecommunications and IT, healthcare, government and defense, transportation and logistics, and consumer goods and retail.
Focusing on the healthcare industry, their larger-than-life problem today is the need to provide value to patients, while remaining cost effective and competitive. They need to move from volume-based services to value based services, by providing more for less and become more patient-centric. But how is this possible in a typical scenario where medical professionals are often overworked due to lack or shortage of staff. Where complex illnesses, longevity and lack of knowledge are contributory factors, upsetting the equilibrium of the industry!
Superimpose this scenario with the Internet era, where patients have more access to information, and their expectations from their healthcare providers is also higher. Where they demand more accountability from doctors, nurses and even their health plans and you know the magnitude of their woes.
If healthcare organizations are able to manage all these problems, they still need to find ways to differentiate themselves from competition to attract and retain people. Where are the resources, the time and the people to achieve all this in a fast moving scenario?
Moving away from internal issues, healthcare organizations are stressed to differentiate themselves to attract and retain people.
Maybe then analytics can be a solution as it provides better insights into treatments and technologies. It can help to improve efficiencies, reduce risk and provide a means to gather and decipher critical data to provide better services.
Seeing the potential of information technology, there has been a proliferation of clinical research systems, electronic health records and devices since the last five years or so. Information explosion and an abundance of data exists today as a result of these devices, but this is resulting in clutter more than intelligence. It is an added dilemma for health organizations to sift through this information to find real value from the same. Already overworked and understaffed, healthcare organizations find data daunting rather than determining.
Luckily the trend is already changing and analytics in healthcare is paving the way for predictive intelligence where healthcare organizations can use data to make intelligent predictions.
Healthcare analytics is not a destination, but a journey that is never completed. If we were to look at an example of analytics in healthcare, we can say, that retrospective analytics is most common, where a hospital looks at its records to see the number of patients who were admitted, causes for admission and so on and so forth. Predictive analysis would require taking this data and looking for common trends to predict the future and finally optimizing the results to save costs and provide greater value to patients will complete the cycle.
Advanced analytics requires the help of a software company which has deep domain knowledge. While most healthcare companies, due to security and fraudulence fears may believe that managing data is an in house task, the fact remains that it requires in-depth technical and domain knowledge to convert data into intelligence.
