Medical professionals take interest in analytics

There is a wide variety of both structured and unstructured data in use in the healthcare field. Everything from the type of billing information present in nearly every industry to unique facts such as patient condition data could be helpful in an analytics context, helping providers make informed decisions.

Analytics expert and author of a book on data use in healthcare Laura Madsen recently spoke to BeyeNETWORK about the role of healthcare data analysis. She told the source that there has been a recent increase in analytic interest by employees in the field due to the introduction of new governance rules and regulations.

According to Madsen, healthcare providers have begun electronically warehousing and managing data following the introduction of the HITECH Act and the Affordable Care Act, which require companies to keep close track of digitally-stored health information.

Even fields mostly invested in paper records can harness analytics, according to EHR Intelligence. Fred Brown, an analytics specialist who mostly works with anesthesiologists, described the process of scanning reams of billing information to the source. Once scanned, Brown's company then performs fairly standard analyses on the data to create a quality of care benchmark and compare procedures to that level.