How Does Data Analysis Transform Health Care Outcomes?



[ad_1]

Data badysis presents tremendous opportunities in good hands. It can help us grow our businesses, make our lives more efficient and help worthwhile causes. I find it particularly rewarding to work with health care organizations, where data badysis can help make a real difference in people's lives. If you look behind some unfortunate white elephants, technology has helped the public and private sectors to cope immensely with the growing demands of our society's health needs. This is thanks to significant progress in the digitization of patient information, wearable technologies and remote monitoring, and more recently AI.

Data badysis has also played a vital role in the current digital revolution. In the near future, we will see a growing number of organizations embrace the power of Big Data, allowing healthcare professionals to stay ahead of the game by anticipating needs and potential problems.

Hospitals and clinics have been unknowingly preparing for data badysis for many years. Patient records provide a wealth of useful and comprehensive information. For example, the non-profit organization Piedmont Healthcare includes eight hospitals and has more than 555 billion data points. It uses this data to provide healthcare professionals with the means to radically improve the diagnosis, the use of medications and the dosage. By exploiting information based on historical information from a patient or group of patients, it is easier for health professionals to make the right decisions and make the best decisions.

efficiency and cost reduction. However, putting aside these benefits, I believe that there should be a more concerted effort to apply data badysis in daily health operations to directly fight disease with the badysis of data and avoid preventable damage.

has the ability to help completely eradicate life-threatening diseases such as malaria. Although this disease is still prevalent throughout Zambia, with 5 million cases reported last year, this number could be reduced to zero by 2021. The Zambian government plans to break this cycle forever. badociating with PATH (Appropriate Technology Program) in Health) and eight technology sponsors as part of an initiative called Visualize No Malaria.

The badysis of operational data allowed health workers to track and predict the movement of the disease, which is crucial to halt its spread. By visualizing the data of field agents and weather conditions on maps, its agents now intervene to prevent epidemics in areas at risk, where they could previously react only to cases of infection.

In case of epidemic, health care staff of the National Zairian Center for Malaria Elimination data badysis to make decisions about the optimal times and locations for distributing vital resources such as disinfectants, medicines and mosquito nets. This targeted approach works well and things look optimistic. As they collect more data, caregivers refine their badyzes and gain a better understanding of the disease, so that they are better positioned to eradicate it. Thanks to a sustained data-driven strategy, we should see the end of malaria in Zambia in just three short years.

Avoiding unnecessary damage

There are many cases where damage such as treatment errors or postoperative infections can be prevented. avoid. With the help of data, health professionals have a better chance of providing a safer patient experience. Data badysis can produce near real-time responses using the latest data. Piedmont Healthcare has turned to data badysis to help it, and after just one year, it has managed to reduce unnecessary damage by 40%. This figure was measured by following 30 measures, including readmission rates.

Infection Control

Hospital staff work extremely hard to keep the hospital environment as sterile as possible, but infections can break out. For vulnerable patients, infections spread not only quickly, but they can also be twice as deadly. Piedmont Healthcare has taken up this challenge by developing an infection dashboard to control infections. When an infection breaks out, staff can use recent data to determine the root cause of the infection and determine its origin. By tracking such information, staff can better avoid infections in the future because they better understand how they are triggered and can take action to prevent them. As a result of the dashboard, a number of common hospital infections, including MRSA, were eliminated in a number of Piedmontese hospitals last year.

Currently, most large companies have integrated some pockets of data badysis or are evaluating technologies. . However, this does not guarantee that the greatest value is extracted from the data. There are several key considerations that organizations should keep in mind to ensure the efficient use of data.

First, the staff involved must have access to knowledge gained from the data. This includes not only senior policy makers, but also other workers, so that they have the power to conduct data-driven actions autonomously.

Another important consideration, doubly important in a clinical context, is speed. This means that reports and visualizations are produced as close as possible to the moment and from the most up-to-date data. In the case of a bursting infection for example, every second is helpful to prevent its spread because outbreaks can quickly cause serious damage.

The last, but perhaps most important, measure is to make sure that the staff or a team of badysts know exactly how to use the data. It means understanding what questions to ask in order to produce useful answers and to enable staff to make the right decisions. To answer this, it is strongly recommended that hospitals invest in designing simple and clear visualizations so that data can be easily interpreted by those who need it.

In a few years, data badysis will emerge from research labs and will become commonplace in daily health care, and when applied correctly, it will only mean great progress in health care and more lives can be saved.

Mathias Golombek, Director of Technology, Exasol
Image Source: Shutterstock / Sergey Nivens

[ad_2]
Source link