Most facilities in the healthcare field face the pressure to reduce costs while increasing their revenue. A recent Becker’s ASC article states that ambulatory surgery centers will need to excel in a single specialty and run a very low cost center model to sustain in the future.
So, could using business analytics really be the key to ensuring your ambulatory surgery center reaches its full potential? We think so. Business analytics can help you optimize your service line structure and align resources at existing facilities. According to Healthcare IT News, “leaders of surgical centers need to keep track of data and performance metrics because it’s the key to heightened productivity and the only way to determine where, and how efficiently, money is funneling in and out of their facilities.” They go on to say that, “by harnessing data, ambulatory surgery centers can begin to enjoy a renewed level of efficiency.”
Russ Richmond, MD, CEO of Objective Health, explains that predictive modeling is one of the most powerful things for health systems to do, as this provides insights into who's likely to come next week, next month, or next year. By using your data to compare your actual visits to your forecasted visits, you can pinpoint opportunities to improve operations and increase the value of each center and also quickly identify underperforming facilities.
Richmond says, “Running analytics on big data is tricky, because most health systems don't have analysts who are capable of big data analytics. It requires industrial grade technology, and it's not going to run on your lap top," he said. "Choosing a partner who's able to run these analytics has benefits and it allows health systems to break away from the traditional types of analytics."
We agree that analytics partners can be a great resource to meet ambulatory surgery centers’ needs as they can provide simple answers and insights from years and countless hours of data collection. The hiccup for most decision makers is gleaning actual business decisions from data and viewing it in a digestible form. Visual Analytics Dashboards are a growing trend as these dashboards do just that - allow you to tangibly gather high-level insights, such as identifying your most successful locations, to more granular insights, such as which procedures are driving your success.
In order to reach your full potential, put your data to work. If you have the business analytics framework, but you’re not putting it to use, perhaps it’s time you pursue an analytics service provider to ensure your ambulatory surgery center is reaching its full potential.