The use of smart data analytics and Business Intelligence is becoming the norm. The healthcare industry is not behind in this trend. 57% of healthcare organizations have implemented patient data analytics to improve patient care and outcomes. And 46% of organizations have implemented analytics of their organizational data to improve their everyday performance.
   Actually, medical organizations are key users in Business Intelligence. They generate enormous amounts of data. And due to legal regulations, they need state of the art BI to analyze it while keeping it safe. Just to get an idea of the amount of data in the healthcare industry and its potential, let’s go over some numbers. According to the University of Iowa, Carver College of Medicine, medical data is expected to double every 73 days by 2020. The volume of health data is growing exponentially; it is expected to be 50 times larger by 2020. This exponential growth can be due to the fact that more than 16,000 hospitals collect data on patients worldwide. And 4.9 million patients use remote monitoring devices (including wearables like Fitbit). Plus, patient monitoring equipment produces an average of 1,000 readings per second.
   Now let’s go over some of the benefits of using data analytics. There can be a 20% decrease in patient mortality by analyzing streaming patient data. Of organizations that analyze their data, 82% reported improved patient care, 63% reported reduced readmission rates, 62% reported improved overall health outcomes, 54% reported improved financial reporting capabilities, 50% reported improved hospital operational performance and 49% reported improved management decision-making.
  Healthcare organizations are implementing data analytics to improve efficiency and patient care. Smart data analytics or BI tools can help organizations analyze the large volumes of data they generate. This data has an enormous potential to reduce operational costs, improve quality of patient care, identify patterns and even save lives. Hospitals can integrate with third-party data sources to do a benchmark of national averages. They can compare their internal metrics and national metrics to revise their processes and improve their operations.
  Medical data can also be used for prevention. For example, to prevent the spread of epidemics, population movements can be tracked with mobile phone location to predict the spread of viruses like Ebola. This allows organizations to identify which regions need urgent allocation of resources and treatment centers. There are new trends appearing, such as Personalized Medicine. It means customizing medicine to a person’s unique genetics. This is done by analyzing together both a person’s genetics and information about their lifestyle. This data can be analyzed together with thousands of others and be used to predict illness patterns.
  There are many things healthcare organizations can do with their data. The following is a list of 20 things that they can do. This list is not closed, meaning there are many more uses and benefits, because the tools can adapt to each organization’s needs.
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