Health care analytics

The clear business value to analytics infrastructure

The need for robust health care data analytics explodes exponentially with the shift to value-based care. At the very foundation, health care organizations can’t operate within value-based care–or recognize its upsides–without robust data and analytics.

The shift in the US health care system to value-based care is likely to demand significant analytic infrastructure investments and expansions across all health stakeholders interested in fully realizing and optimizing its value: health care providers and health systems, plans and payers, life sciences and biopharma. Indeed, in the value-based care paradigm, analytics platforms may increasingly serve as a key competitive differentiator for health organizations.

At the same time, analytics are also being touted as the missing key to unlock new sources of value. As more and more data becomes available from sources like electronic health records, claims, wearable medical devices, social media and from the patients themselves, analytics can increasingly help detect patterns in information, delivering actionable insights and enabling self-learning systems to predict, infer, and conceive alternatives that might not otherwise be obvious. In the future, such analytics-driven insights are likely to play a major role in helping health organizations improve costs and quality, identify and better treat at-risk populations, connect with consumers, and better understand the performance of health interventions on health outcomes.

Analytic infrastructure supporting data capture, integration, and interpretation today can poise organizations to unlock health care data analytics’ full potential clinical and business value in the changing health ecosystem of tomorrow.

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A life sciences and health care perspective: Tech Trends 2018

From “doing digital” to “being digital,” that’s where the life sciences and health care industry needs to go. To help your business navigate digital disruption, this series provides a life sciences and health care perspective on Deloitte's 2018 Tech Trends report. From blockchain to digital reality to the no-collar workforce, explore eight trends that are shaping strategic and operational transformations and redefining life sciences and health care.

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2017 US health plan analytics survey: Becoming an insight-driven organization

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions conducted an online survey of 45 analytics professionals at health plans (with 250,000 or more members) to better understand the priorities and challenges of implementing analytics within a health insurance organization. The Center also conducted 15 interviews with executives at health plans and technology companies to better understand leading practices and lessons learned from insight–driven organizations.

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Population health analytics: Health systems and health plans collaborating to tear down barriers

As the health care industry continues to focus on initiatives to achieve value-based care, many organizations are turning to analytics to help them improve patient outcomes and simultaneously reduce costs. Learn how collaboration across health plans and health systems can help take the power of analytics to the next level.

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Implications for life sciences

While we are still early in the move toward value-based care, in this new framework, medical innovation in life sciences will likely be measured against an evolving definition of value, based on clinical and economic factors, as well as the ability of products to optimize care delivery. Traditional marketing-centric messages are shifting focus to the new bottom line of patient outcomes and long-term economic value. Value-based payment models shift financial risk from health plans to providers and other stakeholders and change how these stakeholders evaluate and make decisions about life sciences innovations and purchases.

Moving forward, life sciences companies have opportunity to serve as a partner in care delivery, with refocused R&D efforts aimed at serving under-met needs identified by health system performance metrics and pricing linked to outcomes. While the value of advanced analytics in R&D applications has long been understood, many biopharma and life sciences companies recognize that in order to survive the transition to value in health care, their organizations must constantly adapt and begin to leverage analytics with non-traditional safety information (e.g., electronic health record data and social media sites) to enhance patient outcomes. Health data analytics will be the foundation of that adaptation and the path forward because with better evidence, informing and improving the performance of nearly every aspect of the life sciences sector–from translational research to portfolio development through post-market safety and outcomes and performance-based contracting in medicine.

Read more about Deloitte’s health care analytics insights for life sciences companies:

• Cognitive health care in 2027
• Getting real with real-world evidence (RWE): 2017 RWE benchmark survey
• The Jetson’s drugstore: Welcome to the digitization of the pharmacy sector
• Connected Patient Challenge highlights innovative ideas in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and patient-engagement technologies
  

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Implications for health care providers

US health systems are undergoing a major transformation in how they are paid and how they are expected to deliver care. As health systems continue to face these evolving payment models, shrinking margins, and tightening budgets, data analytics in health care are being touted as the missing key to unlock new sources of value. As the shift from fee-for-service payment models to value-based care continues, organizations will need to blend financial, operational, clinical, and other data to achieve their goals of improving quality, providing access, controlling cost, and managing provider networks.

Importantly, health care analytics are quickly becoming viewed as a competitive differentiator for value-based care and can add value to a variety of other organizational goals, including, consumer experience, growth initiatives, and cost reduction. Meaningful analytics infrastructures must now include data for population health management, risk management, clinical effectiveness, cost and more - analyzing the entire patient journey across all points of care and leveraging health analytics to continually optimize to drive cost and waste out of the system while keeping quality high. The fragmented analytics infrastructures of the past simply won’t support effective integration of such data moving forward. Organizations with a centralized health care data analytics strategy and governance structure will likely be best positioned to move from the promise of analytics to superior performance.

Read more about Deloitte’s health care analytics insights for health systems:

• The uncertain road ahead: Could technology offer hospitals relief from increasing margin pressures?
• Global hospital of the future
• The power of people analytics
• Powering the digital hospital: Envisioning a future without boundaries through digital health care
  

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Implications for health plans

For health plans and payers, analytical capabilities are a key business imperative to maintain a competitive advantage in the new value-based care payment ecosystem, as fee-for-service and value-based care start to converge. Given the investment in technology and operating models that may be required for physicians and health systems to succeed in the value-based care models required for Medicare reimbursement, commercial health plans will be smart to find ways to run their trains on the same track. Medicare revenue will continue to be important to physicians–expenditures are estimated to reach $1,038 billion in 2024–and physicians may simply not have the interest nor resources to manage to a myriad of metrics across a multitude of payment paradigms.

Measuring medical care by its evidence-based value, instead of by sheer volume, puts a new burden of responsibility on both payers and providers—including the responsibility to work more closely together. Payers and commercial health plans have opportunity to differentiate themselves through not just traditional transactional support, but analytic offerings supporting care systems that measures health outcome values across multiple conditions, providers, and interventions. Now is the time for health plans and payers to define new identities and new offerings for the evolving value-based world. Capabilities such as clinical analytics and population management will be central as providers and plans work together, and forward-thinking health plans are well positioned to transform what was an internal resource—IT power—into one that can be packaged, sold, and shared externally.

Read more about Deloitte’s health care analytics insights for health plans:

• Blog: Social determinants and data analytics may be the keys to a better health plan strategy
  
• 2017 US health plan analytics survey: Becoming an insight-driven organization

• Untie the Gordian Knot, knit together a collaboration
  

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Helping you put patients first

Deloitte has a set of hybrid solutions that help you answer the questions at the heart of your business. Whether you need to analyze real world evidence about a treatment or pinpoint revenue leakage in your health system, we have a solution to help you make fast, well-informed decisions.

ConvergeHEALTH by Deloitte combines powerful analytics and data models with Deloitte’s leading consulting services to enable health systems, health plans, governments, and life sciences firms to answer the “hard questions” in health care—what works, for whom, why, in what context, and at what cost?

ConvergeHealth by Deloitte offers solutions to organizations across all sectors of the health care industry that:

• Use real world evidence for insight-driven decision making 
• Transform your revenue cycle while improving clinical effectiveness and quality outcomes.
• Optimize your physician networks for value based care
• Connect you with your patients 

Discover more about how ConvergeHealth by Deloitte can help you empower your organization to make insight-driven decisions with hybrid analytic and engagement solutions.

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