Modern technology is changing all industries, but it’s not all black and white. While the digital health sector is on the rise, healthcare facilities are still slow to adopt new technologies. Even though the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies in healthcare, the numbers can’t compare with other major industries.
There is a growing need to effectively manage the data generated and stored by new solutions such as AI, wearables, data analytics tools, bioprinting technologies, etc. That is why healthcare organizations must invest in data management systems and improve their digital infrastructure.
Proper healthcare data management lets companies analyze and integrate medical data within their digital solutions. This provides valuable insights for improving patient care, determining medical outcomes, and securing data used in digital solutions.
Automated access to data is a critical component of effective healthcare data management systems — it protects sensitive data from unauthorized access and potential cyberattacks.
At the same time, improving data management can directly improve the patient experience, which is the primary goal of all healthcare facilities.
In this article I will explain how.
Better data management helps deliver more successful treatment
Data management is the process of using, storing, and gathering data — and doing so cost-effectively, efficiently, and securely. The primary goal is to help healthcare organizations optimize their data use within regulation and policy to make better decisions that improve overall results.
It includes data preparation, which is the process of transforming and cleaning raw data to be used for analysis with combined data sets and making corrections. Another essential part of data management is data cleansing, which ensures you have relevant and accurate data that can provide valuable insights.
In other words, data management directly improves the quality of your data and its uses. Having quality data allows you to improve your decision-making when discovering medical problems and treating patients.
Quick and easy appointment scheduling
Data management doesn’t only improve patient experience in treatment, but it starts at the beginning — completing forms to booking appointments.
On average, patients not facing life-threatening issues wait for 26 days to get an appointment scheduled and wait around 20 minutes before getting examined by a clinician.
The pre-service period affects the overall patient experience, and healthcare organizations need to deploy the right technologies to create a good data strategy. One of the options for healthcare providers is to adopt online booking tools that notify patients when to arrive and provide instant notifications for any follow-up information.
The first thing that’s needed is robust patient scheduling software fed with quality and relevant data. From there, these tools can schedule appointments with email reminders, automated confirmations, automated responses, broadcast messages, etc.
Faster patient processing and quicker care
Source: Pexels
When you know what’s happening to your patients, you can respond quickly and with adequate care. However, the biggest problem is determining what’s wrong and diagnosing promptly.
Health data management allows you to create comprehensive views of patient groups, households, and patients with composite profiles that will allow you to make predictions and understand their current status.
Not only does data management help everyone within your health organization see the data they need and share valuable information, but it also helps you share data with other healthcare providers. Data regulations and compliance, data changes, and fragmented data make processing patients and providing proper care challenging.
Data management deals with all these issues and ensures the right data is available at the right time. One thing that’s required to make it work efficiently is the right data access services. For example, if a patient has an injury, the physician should be able to instantly access their medical history and see the best course of action.
Improve experience through data reports
With patient satisfaction and experience reports, healthcare providers can learn what their patients think about their service and experiences. For example, a report can be focused on understanding how the nurses are doing, how well the staff communicates with patients, is the level of care satisfactory, etc.
However, the problem is that these reports are always filled with patients’ subjective perceptions and biases. Data management allows companies to turn these perceptions into actionable, quantifiable, and meaningful datasets they can use for analytics.
With insights from this data, organizations can develop strategies for improving various aspects of their operations using guided data reports.
Such reports can influence leadership within the hospital to improve patient outcomes. Patient experience and satisfaction reports can also help identify people who need further help and develop dedicated action plans that help people on a personal level.
Conclusion
Effective data management doesn’t only allow organizations to provide better care to their patients overall, but it also helps reduce operational costs.
Data has opened many opportunities, from directly improving decision making when treating patients to allowing companies to make actionable and meaningful datasets. That’s why investing in better data management can improve the overall patient experience and help healthcare providers treat their patients more efficiently. Author’s bio
Editor’s Note: Ben is an experienced tech leader and book author with a background in endpoint security, analytics, and application & data security. Ben filled roles such as the CTO of Cynet, and Director of Threat Research at Imperva. Ben is the Chief Scientist for Satori, the DataSecOps platform, as well as VP of Marketing.
