Running a successful medical practice requires an incredibly diverse skill set. Operations, marketing, finance, human resources, and the professional growth of your team are just a few of the critical aspects of keeping the business healthy, not to mention all of the time, knowledge, and responsibilities necessary to fulfill the core mission of your practice: taking exceptional care of your patients.
How is the team, no matter how big or small, supposed to keep it all straight? Well, one answer that’s been given increasingly in recent memory is data. But why is data so important to a medical practice? Which data is the most important to a practice’s health? And how should it be used in order to make short- and long-term decisions for your practice, your team, and your patients?
At DataDx, we liken the way we use data to the same way you use an evidence-based system to diagnose and treat your patients. You’d never make recommendations to your patients without having the right information in front of you. Why should you treat your practice any differently?
But making confident, strategic decisions about your practice means more than just having data — you need the right data, organized in the right way, to help you overcome everyday challenges and achieve your goals, no matter how simple or complex.
Let’s explore further how the right data and the right data platform can help you improve every aspect of your practice’s health.
The right data will improve team performance
The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter what role you might play in the practice, whether you’re a physician, nurse, assistant, manager, or administrator, having the right data at your disposal will help you understand how to make better decisions for yourself, your teammates, and the people that you’re serving.
For larger healthcare organizations, their ability to employ data and analytics teams often come baked into their long-term strategies — they have the specialists, software, and infrastructure in place to take advantage of their practice data.
Smaller, independent entities, on the other hand, are forced to rely on their intuition while facing increasing market pressures, including threats of corporate consolidation, decreasing reimbursements, and ever-dwindling budgets and independence.
DataDx has created a platform that can plug into virtually any practice management system, giving smaller, independent practitioners and their teams the opportunity to compete on a level not previously available to clinics of their size, budget, and scope, creating real opportunities for growth and sustainability.
For instance, DataDx serves a multi-location, primary care medical facility that focuses on a rural patient population. Having accurate data is essential to a wide range of practice needs, including resource allocation; alleviating administrative burdens; finding, training, and retaining top talent; as well as contract negotiation.
DataDx gives the practice the information it needs in order to overcome these challenges in a way never before possible.
The right data tells you where you were, where you are, and where you’re going
It’s incredibly difficult to make the right business decisions about your practice when you only have a portion of the information that you need.
That’s what makes data software solutions so powerful. You can finally have a clear, comprehensive picture of your practice’s past and present, which can help make informed predictions about your future, a critical tool in today’s healthcare landscape.
Having access to your practice’s historical data presented in an easy to access and understand format will help you identify trends, gain valuable insights about numerous aspects of the practice, and provide answers to questions you couldn’t previously understand.
This data can also help you make educated predictions about your practice’s future by using your current and historical data, helping you make decisions about staffing, patient needs, and more.
The right data will make your practice more operationally efficient
Do you really have the information you need on a day-to-day basis regarding your practice’s processes? Do you currently have a way of creating benchmarks in the practice that allow you set goals, measure your progress, and make real-time adjustments to processes when necessary, all while still delivering the highest standard of care possible?
Having the right data presented in the right way will help you create operational standards, align your team around those expectations, identify waste in your process, and ultimately save you time, money, and stress so you can focus more of your efforts on taking care of your patients, growing your team, and finding new ways to increase revenue for the practice. Without well organized, real-time data, you’re just shooting in the dark.
Platforms like DataDx can save practice administrators, providers, and even patients countless hours, not to mention dollars, which in turn creates better outcomes for all.
The right data will improve patient care
This is perhaps the most important outcome of having the right data software integrated in the practice.
Just giving patients access to their own healthcare data alone has gone a long way in helping them feel empowered to take a more active role in asking better questions and developing deeper relationships with their providers.
This can lead to patients seeking care out earlier than they typically would in the past, creating a mindset of preventative vs. reactive care, improving the health and well being of so many in our patient populations.
What’s more, this information can help providers gain a clearer understanding of health trends on an individual and community-wide level, helping the practice identify health issues and provide care sooner than was previously possible.
This use of data and turning it into a standardized process makes a value-based care system achievable for the practice, which focuses on quality of care over quantity of patients seen, and can lead to increased patient satisfaction, the elimination of redundant or unnecessary tests and procedures, lower costs for the patient, as well as the potential for increased reimbursements for the practice.
The bottom line: Data is essential, but context is key
At DataDx, we’ve built our business on creating a platform that integrates with a wide range of EMR systems so that people who are focused on different aspects of the practice have the data they need to make the most informed decisions for their patients and for the practice’s business goals.
DataDx makes it possible for financial, operational and patient care platforms to interact with each other to produce more complete and sophisticated reports, giving you a comprehensive view of the practice’s health.
This helps you cross-reference data points for quick comparative analysis so any operational question can be answered right away, as well as see where the practice might be over- or underspending, and how you can confidently make new investments for the future.
This is real-time data, with AI and machine learning capabilities, that allows you to filter out the noise and understand your practice’s health in just a few clicks.
Benchmarking, anomaly detection, automated reporting — it’s all there, because it’s exactly what practices need to thrive in today’s volatile healthcare environment. Data isn’t the future, it’s the present, and our goal is to help independent medical practices have access to the same advantages that corporate clinics do.
We encourage anyone interested in learning more about how DataDx can help your practice improve its operations, increase its profitability, and deliver a higher level of care to their patients to visit DataDx to learn more.