Aubrey van Aswegen, MD of business intelligence company Knowledge Integration Dynamics, examines the role of data warehouse applications in the healthcare industry.
Few, if any, market sectors in South Africa face challenges comparable with those before healthcare today. These challenges are to be found in every aspect of healthcare, from medical aid to health insurance, from doctors to pharmaceutical companies, from private hospitals to government institutions.
One issue common to all these institutions is a lack of topical and meaningful information about their business; information with they could make better, more informed decisions.
These organisations are under pressure to reduce costs and provide better, differentiated service; to manage risk better and reduce fraud and abuse of their systems. They typically have plenty of data, but lack meaningful information. If they could have proper access to this data, they could determine:
How to keep from increasing premiums while providing the same or an improved level of healthcare.
How to provide medical services to as many people as possible, without the systems being abused.
Who is abusing systems: such as who is claiming multiple benefits and receiving more medicine than they should.
Trends in patient care.
The performance of specific physicians.
Over-payments to physicians.
The average hospital period for a medical problem.
Medication patterns.
Areas of wastage.
Billing patterns.
Healthcare problems are not unique to South Africa, but with our particular social, socigraphic and demographic situation, they have been thrown into sharp relief.
Just as one example, consider what it takes for hospitals in each province to ensure that they only treat patients from the province under their jurisdiction. Under the current dispensation, hospitals in Gauteng, say, have no way of rejecting non-emergency Mpumalanga, Northern Province, North West Province or Free State patients. Yet they should have the ability, and the right, given that they are operating under tight budgets.
Lack of valuable information about their operational systems is one of the principal reasons for the chaos we see in the South African hospital system. These hospitals have no way of budgeting for the required number of beds in a stated period, of ordering the right quantities of medicine, staffing up to optimal levels, or anticipated cash flow.
New focus on customers
At the other end of the spectrum, in the high-value sector of the market, healthcare is moving from a wholesale to a retail environment. This places the onus on healthcare providers to focus anew on their customers. And the starting point for keeping customers is knowing and managing them, through a data warehouse application which can be analysed and interrogated as a key input for strategic planning.
Managed healthcare has created a new set of dynamics and competitiveness. A marketing-oriented data warehouse can provide in-depth customer knowledge, allowing a healthcare provider to pave the way for an enhanced relationship with members:
Evaluate products and services
: The data warehouse provides information about products and services most used, most valued and frequency of visits. Customers in different market segments are inclined to make of use different products and services, marketers can gain clues about which services to target to specific populations.
Understand the value of customers
: By using the data warehouse to acquire and organise strategic knowledge about customer value, the healthcare organisation can develop profiles of loyal customers - and determine customer lifetime value - using demographics, behavioural or lifestyle data, product and service utilisation, survey data and information about customer healthcare attitudes. The healthcare organisation can use this knowledge to deliver care to its customers, keep customers happy, move other customers to higher levels of satisfaction and acquire new members with the same profile as their highly satisfied customers.
Evolve contact strategies
: After the healthcare organisation has chosen prospects who closely resemble its best customers and evaluated products and services, it can improve contact strategies to deliver optimal value for members. The healthcare organisation can manage campaigns and track responses so the contact strategy can be evaluated and refined. Marketers can test different media - direct mail, newsletters, phone, the Web - and identify various ways to deliver value to current and prospective customers.
Perform strategic planning
: Strategic planning can take place when marketers use customer data, analyse product and service usage, and manage ongoing marketing programmes. Using the data warehouse to benchmark, track campaigns, analyse results and plan based on their findings, they build a personalised strategic approach that takes healthcare marketing to the member.
Advanced analytic applications, deployed on a data warehouse, arm healthcare organisations with knowledge about value delivered to customers. In addition, they can ascertain why, how and when they use healthcare: powerful, relevant and usable information.
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