Population Health Analytics to Justify Grants for Service Expansion

Self-service analytics is widely used by large healthcare networks that operate hundreds of care locations, treat hundreds of thousands of hospital admissions and emergency department (ED) visits, and employ tens of thousands of staff members. Healthcare systems use population self-service analytics, for example, to collect data on early warning signals of potential health crises among the population, like the rapidly increasing rate of mental health problems and more. With this data, they can prove the necessity of creating additional resources, such as crisis stabilization units, to reduce the workload on the ED services. Organizations report on securing millions of investments for their initiatives based on these data-driven arguments. What is the strategy they undertake to achieve such results?

If healthcare networks implement self-service analytics software, they will have the data justifying the need to renovate or expand healthcare services and be able to convince investors to fund their improvement projects.

However, the absence of relevant analytic tools hampers healthcare networks from successfully rationalizing their ideas.

Challenges on the Way to Encourage Investor Support

Statistics demonstrate growth in the percentage of people whose treatment needs were unmet. Sometimes, for particular health conditions requiring immediate assistance, the indicators can exceed the national average.

In their efforts to stabilize the situation, healthcare organizations face the following challenges:

• Rising numbers of people addressing EDs for help with their health emergencies
• Exhausted ED resources, caused by multiple patients addressing EDs with their emergency conditions and demanding lengthy treatment periods
• Decreased level of care and follow-up support due to limited resources
• Absence of specialized stabilization units for patients needed immediate support as alternatives to limited EDs, hospitals, and other facilities 
• Lack of significant funds to expand services
• Lack of high-quality, convincing data regarding certain population groups, their demographics, and community peculiarities to support the case and attract investment
• The necessity to collect the data from tens of thousands of square miles to demonstrate how vast the service area is and how many people suffering from sudden deterioration of their health need care
• Limited time provided for preparing the grant application or investment proposal and the necessity to meet the deadlines
• Difficulties with quick data gathering caused by limited access to local EHRs, unstructured data, and outdated methods.

Features of Self-Service Analytics Software to Craft Compelling Investment Proposals

To attract investment and redesign the healthcare delivery system, medical organizations should prove the need for additional health facilities with compelling data. With the help of self-service analytics, organizations can do the following:

• Use the ad hoc method of data analysis to categorize population groups without complicated SQL coding
• Quickly provide the required high-quality data visualizations, such as the number of patients suffering from depression, anxiety disorder, or substance abuse who have to pass tens of miles to reach the nearest healthcare center
• Leverage de-identified data and defined population groups in multiple contexts quickly and without compromising patient privacy
• Visualize ED patient arrival patterns, primary complaints, and secondary diagnoses, and emphasize the extended length of stay (LOS) among patients with special health conditions
• Indicate the gaps in specialized health services and limited capacities of EDs on the basis of the frequency of attending ED by patients with certain health emergencies
• Demonstrate the number of people who can benefit from crisis stabilization services on the basis of ED utilization, zip codes of the patients, and calculated distance to care facilities.

What Benefits to Expect from Implementing Healthcare Self-Service Analytics?

Self-service analytics software helps healthcare networks quickly gain insights to support their grant application process. As reported, analytics provide them with the following accomplishments:

• Healthcare organizations can gather and demonstrate the data that indicates the need to extend specific services
• Healthcare networks can award million-dollar grants for particular health projects and facilities
• Healthcare providers are able to open additional facilities and specialized health units, like a crisis stabilization unit, thanks to these investments.

How Belitsoft Can Help

Belitsoft is a full-cycle software development and analytics consulting company that specializes in healthcare software development. We help top healthcare data analytics companies build robust data analytics platforms.

For integrated data platforms developed to collect, store, process, and analyze large volumes of data from various sources (Electronic Medical Records, clinic management systems, laboratory systems, financial systems, etc.), we:

• Automate data processing workflows (cleansing, standardization, and normalization).
• Configure scalable data warehouses.
• Set up and implement analytical tools for creating dashboards, reports, and data visualizations.
• Ensure a high level of data security and compliance with healthcare regulations such as HIPAA.
• Integrate machine learning and AI into analytics.

We also help build specialized self-service analytical applications like Population Health Analytics with the following functionality, without being limited to it: 

• Categorizing population groups
• Data analysis without SQL coding
• Visualization tools.

If you're looking for expertise in data analytics, data integration, data infrastructure, data platforms, HL7 interfaces, workflow engineering, and development within cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), hybrid, or on-premises environments, we are ready to serve your needs. Contact us today to discuss your project requirements.