Why Healthcare Industry will Begin Developing Analytics Capabilities

Globally, the healthcare industry faces major challenges such as rising costs, improving quality of care, patient outcomes, cost optimisation, waste and fraud.

Trends that drive technology deployment

• Use of mobile technologies is gaining traction
• Focus on accountability and transparency
• Cost pressures on healthcare budgets
• Changing buying centres and roles
• Cloud adoption is growing

According to Anurag Gupta, Research Director, Government & Healthcare, EMEA & APAC, Gartner, “Technology is increasingly looked at as means to reduce spiralling healthcare costs. IT enables Health care Delivery Organization (HDOs) to deliver active prevention and targeted care programmes. e-health spending is rising in all major countries led by ambitious plans to provide healthcare providers and patients access to online data. India is a very interesting market.”

The healthcare industry in India is largely predicted to grow to $120 billion by 2015. Fuelled by this growth, the industry will begin to develop its analytics capabilities and embrace data science. This in turn will lead to a big demand for data scientists.

Not only will they need junior level analytics talent for simple tasks like sorting, reporting and data exploring, but also more experienced analytic professionals to manage and manipulate, visualise and interpret the more complex, humungous volumes of health related data that are collected on a daily basis across the country.

Healthcare uses ERP for better experience
ERP is one trend that has been empowering the healthcare sector. Enterprise-wide operational efficiency is vital for growing hospitals.

Three advantages that ERP can bring in would be: Cost-effective hospital supply chain management, stringent fiscal control and streamlined human capital management.

   1. Streamline the flow of information across the hospital and bring efficiency
   2. Manage the large and varied amounts of data across the HDO and make available information when/where/who requires it.

   3. Help automate the core processes and leverage technology.

For example, instead of telephonic appointment, an online appointment etc. 4. Manage / optimise resource usage within the organisation
5. Keep track of inventory, finances, accounting etc. Set up auto alerts, use management dashboards etc.

Implementing ERP in health care gets challenging
Lack of understanding of the core business requirements and how this translates with the provider ERP solution is something that vendors and IT Managers need to plan better on. Many organisations start with a high-level blueprint that shows the adoption of ERP across a broad range of business process areas, using standard functionality wherever possible. This is an easy assumption to make at a strategic level, but there can be issues when the project starts the actual rollout.

Outlining the challenges, Gupta says, “Organisations need to ensure that operational and customer-facing processes will not be compromised by slavishly adhering to standard ERP functionality.” Others would include:

 A. Under-estimating the overall cost of the system (upfront cost and the other maintenance costs)

 B. Inadequate training of resources to use the system

 C. A key contributor to many failed ERP projects is mishandling the organisational changes associated with implementation

 D. Failure to evolve ERP along with the growth of the business. Many ERP implementations view their deployment as an end state. This leads to valuing stability over business responsiveness.

Gupta feels that major technology investments would be made in areas like electronic health records, hospital information systems, quality improvement initiatives like performance monitoring systems, portals etc. Some other focus areas will be tele-medicine, cloud computing/software-as-a-service (SaaS), customer relationship management software especially for large private hospitals, mobile device management (MDM), databases, servers, etc.

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