Get the Most Out of Your Data Analytics

As the cost of healthcare continues to rise throughout the country, more employers and benefits professionals are looking to invest in solutions to address this increased line-item in their budget. More organizations that are dealing with this issue are searching for the right healthcare data analytics company to help make sense of their population data in a meaningful way.

There are, however, many ways that an employer or benefits consultant can utilize healthcare analytics solutions. The top healthcare data companies offer different forecasting methods, benchmarking models, and utilization metrics that the end-user can put together into different ways to affect member health outcomes. To help cut out some of the learning curve, this post will go into a few different ways that organizations can get the most out of their healthcare data analytics vendor.

Using Healthcare Analytics Solutions to Change Benefit Plan Designs

One of the greatest benefits from the top healthcare analytics vendors is the 30,000-foot vision that they provide to their employer clients. Analyzing data on that macro-level allows for clarity that normally wouldn’t be available when bogged down in the minute details of healthcare planning. Nowhere is this macro-level view more important than when organizations are changing benefit plan designs.

Many of the largest healthcare data analytics companies allow for predictive modeling once the software has access to enough population health data. Solutions, like Springbuk for instance, can point out the consequences of changes to a company’s plan design. For example, Springbuk can help companies see the financial impact of how their plan pays for prescription drugs. Drug prices have continued to carve out a larger and larger percentage of employer’s benefits spend, so it can be extremely useful for an organization to use healthcare data vendors to see what the difference in their bottom line would be if they changed their plan to steer patients toward generic drugs instead of brand name. Sometimes, that one small change can be worth tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the calendar year.

Integrating Healthcare Data Vendors with Onsite Clinics and Wellness Vendors

Another way to get the most out of healthcare analytics is to make them the one source of truth for employee health and wellness. Modern healthcare analytics software choices like Springbuk have the ability to integrate with multiple sources of healthcare data, bringing entire histories of member lives into one place. The more data that data analytics vendors have, the better predictions and analytics they can produce.

That’s why integrating healthcare data from onsite clinics and wellness vendors is so critical. If a member is treated for an illness or injury, that data might reflect a change that has an effect on their health going forward. Likewise, wellness vendors offer organizations many programs and tools that help to improve member health that have real consequences. Fitness challenges and other initiatives need to be tracked and that’s where healthcare analytics solutions come in. These software solutions import data from clinics, wellness vendors, and insurance carriers to be the single place that employers and their brokers go to understand the depth of member population health.

Utilizing Healthcare Analytics to Track Health Long Term Outcomes

All of the top healthcare data companies will tell you that improving health outcomes certainly has an effect in the short term, but that employers see real value when employee lives are changed over a long period of time. As employer-sponsored initiatives take effect, employees are more likely to change their habits in a meaningful way which often translates to better overall health and a decrease in number of medical claims.

This is where healthcare analytics solutions become a critical resource in correlating the changes made by the management and their effect on the member population. One example of this would be a company’s effort to move employees from the high-risk health categories to a lower risk tier. There’s plenty of merit to designing a fitness challenge or exercise program for the employee population within a workplace, but without a baseline to track it against in the long-run, employers won’t be seeing exactly what kind of impact it has. With a proper healthcare analytics solution, there would be plenty of data to show which employees have moved risk categories and what kind of path they took to get there. With that information, the employers and wellness professionals can build a better program to try and help more people, and the company’s bottom line.