Do you know what you do best? Traditionally, that's a question many healthcare providers may not ever have bothered to ask themselves. That's because under the fee-for-service model which has shaped healthcare in this country for years, providers really haven't needed to know which parts of their practices were the most efficient or resulted in the highest health outcomes. Just so long as they were compensated for the services they provided.
But that model is beginning to change, and quickly, and attendees at AHIP's Institute 2012 in Salt Lake City, will get a chance to hear what they can expect next, later today as Casey Graves and John Keith, principals at Deloitte Consulting LLP, will discuss the expanding role of business analytics in "Leveraging Data Analytics to Drive New Operating Models".
As Keith sees it, analytics tools have been available to healthcare stakeholders for quite some time. The problem was, no one needed to use them.
"This is the first time there's actually a customer for analytics," he said. The reason, he explained, is that only now is "the inherent makeup of the industry changing from volume to value, so it's the first time the industry will demand analytics at the scale necessary."
He noted that it's "been tried, but failed, because the economic model didn't value it."
What providers now realize, Keith said, is that due to a number of influences –first and foremost national healthcare reform – the amount they're getting paid for their services is changing faster then they're able to reduce the cost of providing them.
Consequently, providers need to analyze both their practices and the overall healthcare market in order to figure out where they best fit in and how they can best operate in order to develop a competitive advantage.
According to Graves, providers will see that "there are new and interesting ways to grow the use of analytics given the disruptions in the market already underway."
He said that for each section of the healthcare market, stakeholders will need to determine where they fit, what section of the healthcare space they want to occupy, then determine the investments they want to make and the collaborations they want to build that will enable them to succeed.
As for the future, Keith said "the evolution towards (a value-based) market is not going to be a big bang. It's going to be where people find the most inefficient parts of the market" and then figure out how to improve upon those inefficiencies.
Healthcare markets, he predicted, are finally going to become like other markets.