For everybody in the healthcare community—the providers, hospitals, health systems, exchanges, payers and technology experts—the need of the hour is analytics. Data is generated in numerous steps and processes in the revenue cycle arena, from the time the patient visits the facility to the time the reimbursements are made.

Healthcare analytics are needed for providing value to business units and their customers, while at reducing their operating costs without impacting the level of services they offer.

Data coming from thousands of data points, unless analyzed and its intelligence used, will be of no use. Healthcare analytics is the answer for the industry which has to focus on the actual care, reduce costs, and at the same time comply with the industry standards.

It is not an option for any entity involved in healthcare, particularly the payer. The payer might want to focus on avoiding ‘over payments’ as the current scenario does not help in that perspective thereby increasing costs per member.

The industry gurus are focusing on improving the actual care from the patient standpoint. With the data coming from different sources, in different formats, acts such as the Affordable Care Act, the Patient Protection Act, and more make it mandatory for people to go electronic. Implementing EHR thus becomes mandatory because of which the analytics can be created.

With the current limitations in analytics, the ever-growing costs are due to readmissions and repeat visits to healthcare providers. The healthcare community across the world is getting better at focusing on value instead of sheer volume. Analytics is definitely the answer to achieve that.