Running a hospital is certainly not an easy job, and it is highly demanding. Hospital managers have to think about managing things such as buying healthcare supplies, buying items for physicians to use, ensuring the quality of the care that is being provided to the patients is kept high, bed management, maintaining the building and the hospital facilities, reducing hospital spending in areas where possible and so on.
Using organized healthcare data analytics helps hospital managers to do their job properly and make important decisions on a daily basis. We have come up with some reasons why having data analytics is so important for hospital managers.
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Why Data Analytics is Important for Hospital Managers
1. Save Money
As a hospital manager, you should think of data analytics as your friend and a useful tool which can help you to save the hospital money and run it in a more efficient way to benefit the patients. Of course, looking into the hospital’s data will help you understand where you can save money in the future.
Perhaps, for example, if your data analytics indicates that you are currently overpaying as a hospital for medical equipment such as gloves, facemasks, and theatre gowns, then you need to find another medical supplier that will provide your hospital with better value for money.
Data can also help you save money for the hospital by encouraging you to come up with new ideas on how you can run processes in the healthcare supply chain more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Maybe you can save yourself money in the healthcare supply chain by going for items from a more affordable provider on the market. To ensure profitability for your hospital and transform your patient care you need to identify the key areas to reduce costs.
2. Improve Efficiency and Problem-Solving
Data analytics help hospital managers run the hospital in a more streamlined and efficient way. Access to well-managed and organized data allows those managing the hospital to come up with strategies and ways they can run the hospital more efficiently.
From data analytics, hospital management may figure out that they are grossly overspending every month on covering staff salaries. Hospital managers must think up solutions and ways they can save money on staffing and recruitment.
Outsourcing hospital services to external providers is one way that can help to iron out inefficiencies such as staff shortages and can also reduce spending costs.
Outsourcing also helps provide a quick solution to staff shortages. For example, if you desperately need a nurse to cover a night shift but you do not have one at your disposal in your in-house team, you can contact a nurse staffing agency you have a relationship with to provide you with a fully trained registered nurse as soon as possible.
3. Boost Staff Performance and Retain Staff
Staff is obviously at the heart of running any hospital. Hospital managers will have tons of staff data available to them relating to staff performance, days off, and so on.
If hospital managers notice inefficiencies that appear from the data analytics relating to staff performance and a worryingly high staff turnover, they must work out ways they can motivate staff members and retain staff.
One way to raise staff performance is by providing them with incentives and rewarding their good performance and demonstrating that the hospital as an employer has recognized and appreciated their contribution at work.
Rewards for hospital staff may include things such as a few extra days off, pay bonuses, promotions to higher-paid roles, and so on. Keeping staff motivated and energized in a high-pressured hospital working environment is vital.
Not being able to retain staff and having an overly high staff turnover can also be a nightmare for hospital managers. Team spirit and workplace cooperation are especially important for people working in hospitals who potentially help to perform life saving medical procedures on a daily basis.
4. Provide Patients with Good Quality Care
Data is also essential in helping you to provide better-quality care to patients, who are always the most important people in a hospital. There will be tons of useful data at your disposal regarding how long patients stay in the hospital after treatment.
The follow-ups and medical services patients require after being discharged from the hospital, the cost of surgical procedures performed on patients in the hospital, patient mortality rates and so on.
So, healthcare data analytics should be embraced by hospital managers to help them drive up the quality of the service the hospital provides to patients.
A good example of how hospital managers can use data to improve the patient experience is the issue of how they approach reducing patient waiting times in hospitals.
Long waiting times could be something that severely negatively affects patient satisfaction levels. Hospital managers should be able to pick up on any issues relating to lengthy waiting times as it should feature in the hospital’s data analytics.
The hospital’s management team has to then put measures in place to try and bring down the patient waiting times. Hospital managers will then later be able to see if their actions have been successful by looking at the data relating to patient waiting times in the hospital.
If waiting times have significantly gone down, their actions and intervention were successful and made a positive change to the quality of the service patients receive.
In addition to looking at data analytics, hospital managers can also use other methods to find out patients’ opinions on the quality of the care the hospital has provided to them.
For example, hospital managers can create questionnaires and surveys to be filled out by patients to help them gage patient satisfaction levels and understand the ways that patients feel the hospital could improve.
Hospitals can also communicate with patients and get feedback on what they think about the quality of the hospital’s care via polls, emails, text messages, and so on.
5. Provide Reports on Performance to Stakeholders
Well-managed data can be useful for helping to produce reports which can then be handed over by hospital management to the stakeholders.
Understandably, stakeholders in hospitals will want to be reassured that the hospital is running well as a healthy business and that their investment is secure. Organized data will show stakeholders just how well the hospital is performing.
So, data analytics is a useful tool that hospitals can use these days. Data analytics should be embraced by hospital managers and used to help them ensure that the hospital is able to provide higher quality levels of care to its patients.
