MUSING – Healthcare Systems See a Compelling Need for Operational Intelligence
Successful healthcare delivery networks must adapt to the increasingly challenging financial environment to achieve their fundamental mission of providing high quality, efficient, appropriate healthcare to their communities. Balancing costs, access to care, and quality demands real-time awareness and intelligence across the system, using relevant and customizable analytics to minimize the chance of losses with new ‘at risk’ delivery models. Simultaneously, this must be accomplished using a platform that can integrate with—and not disrupt—the current technology base by automatically and invisibly consuming and processing disparate data streams. Several medical informatics and automation offerings have entered the market to help manage the wide variety of resources and schedules that are required to maintain high-quality patient service by a health system, for example Cerner, Intelligent InSites, and Stanley. The market is clearly receptive since recently the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system adopted the Intelligent InSites operational intelligence platform for its 152 VA Medical Centers nationwide due to its open, scalable, and cloud-based platform.
The key to lowering costs while maintaining quality is to leverage technology and synergistic process improvement to know the location and status of the things an institution has, how they are working, where the people who provide different services are, where patients are—and how they all interact in real time. By collecting and analyzing operational data, leading healthcare systems are lowering supply-chain costs, producing better workflows and better safety compliance—resulting in superior care for more people at lower cost.