Healthcare behind on business intelligence

Healthcare has not caught up to other industries when it comes to business intelligence (BI), as more than half of healthcare organizations have not implemented such systems, according to a survey conducted by TEKsystems.

The 58 percent of physician practices and hospitals that said their organization has not implemented a BI system includes 36 percent who do not have a BI system, 15 percent that do not have such a system but plan to implement one in the next 12 to 24 months and 7 percent that have a BI system but have yet to implement it.

“With how the business of healthcare is shifting, organizations that have not implemented, or are not planning to implement, a business intelligence solution run the risk of losing ground quickly,” said Ryan Skains, TEKsystems director of healthcare services, in a release. “Data will be at the heart of how healthcare organizations--hospitals and physicians' practices--get paid. That is all changing as a result of paradigm shifts in the industry around reimbursement optimization and a change from a fee-for-service to a pay-for-performance model.”

The survey also indicates that healthcare organizations lack the resources and skills available to implement BI systems with 32 percent naming this as the biggest threat to implementation. Respondents indicated they expected a BI system to be widely used in finance (76 percent), operations (75 percent) and clinical care (71 percent). More than one-third report that data complexity poses the greatest challenge. More than one-third (34 percent) indicated that data complexity was the top obstacle to reaching their goal of implementing a BI system. Within the data complexity category, respondents identified the most painful aspects as lack of a standardized data structure (34 percent), analysis requirements (24 percent), and disparate systems and lack of interoperability (23 percent).

Almost half (48 percent) of respondents cite improvement of data availability and completeness as one of the top three goals for their BI system implementation. Other top goals include patient care and payment processes; better connection of patient treatments to medical outcomes (37 percent); optimization of reimbursements (34 percent); and meeting pay-for-performance standards (32 percent).

Most (86 percent) of respondents say data architects will be the most difficult role to fill when looking for BI implementation skill sets, as well as data analysts (84 percent), business analysts (81 percent) and software developers (80 percent).