INTELLIGENT HEALTHCARE
healthcare facilities allocate staff and
device resources in real time in order to
eliminate bottlenecks, reduce patient
waiting times and provide optimal
patient care and coverage. These
proactive steps contribute to improved
patient satisfaction and outcomes.
2. Allow care providers to see if
treatments are effective.
David Whitton, General Manager
of Kodak Alaris for the Middle East,
argues that utilising data collection
can provide the basis for increased
efficiency and improvements in the
healthcare sector
1. Helping care providers identify
health trends and risks.
Clinical analysis allows healthcare
practices to generate reports based
on aggregated data at individual and
group levels in order to identify illness
trends, proactively treat patients and
offer focused preventative wellness
programmes or advice. Real-time
analytics can help predict disease
outbreaks, enabling preventative
measures such as offering vaccinations
for illnesses like the flu and pneumonia,
which traditionally have high costs of
treatment. These measures not only
reduce costs for the business and for
patients, but they can also improve the
overall health of the community.
Clinical analysis helps reduce hospital
readmissions by helping clinicians
provide comprehensive, proactive
care and discharge at the right time.
It can highlight complications that
are commonly linked to primary
illnesses so healthcare providers know
what symptoms to watch for. This
early warning can help care providers
treat patients at the first sign of an
exacerbated or secondary illness, and
avoid readmissions reimbursement
penalties. Clinical analysis also helps
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Clinical analysis allows healthcare
providers to monitor the effect of
treatments over time with individuals
or groups. This real-time data can help
clinicians change an ineffective or sub-
effective course of treatment earlier in
the patient care cycle, in contrast to the
traditional ‘watch and wait’ scenario. By
changing a course of treatment earlier,
healthcare providers can head off
secondary disease, provide a structured,
reassuring course of treatment, and
improve the treatment effects for the
patient and the overall success rate of
the practice.
3. Enable decision making based
on foresight.
In the past, administrators and clinicians
had to make the best decisions they
could based on personal experience
or data manually aggregated from
“It can be
challenging
to extract
comprehensive
information
from healthcare
data in
unstructured
formats such
as email, faxes,
text messages
and paper.”
databases and spreadsheets. Making
decisions based on spreadsheets
introduces unnecessary risk because
spreadsheets are notoriously error-prone
and labour intensive. Data management
software is exponentially faster, more
powerful and more reliable than manual
legacy tools such as Excel, which were
originally designed for finance.
For healthcare providers, this real- or
near-real-time data analysis can improve
patient care and quality of life because
it is based on data gathered from silos
across the entire practice, and is free of
human intervention (therefore reducing
error). Clinical and business analytics
allow administrators and care providers
to make decisions based on data offering
supported foresight instead of guesses.
Rich data and analytics give decision
makers the ability to actually affect
future results with a reasonable degree of
confidence in the outcome.
In conclusion, new health data analysis
tools provide expanded opportunities
for healthcare providers to streamline
operations, improve patient care and
outcomes, and reduce costs for the
practice and the patient.
By leveraging advanced information
management technology, healthcare
providers can capture, classify and present
aggregated data formerly trapped in
structured and unstructured data formats.
Once managed, this data can be used for
business and clinical analysis that benefits
the business, patients and population.
By gathering critical data trapped in silos
and systems across the business and
practice, applying predictive analysis
and making results available, clinicians,
administrators, key decision makers and
healthcare practices can lower costs for
the organisation and improve quality of
life for everyone.
David Whitton has worked in document
management related businesses since
1989 starting in document scanning
with Bell and Howell in 1996 covering
Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
His first encounter with the Middle
East was at Fujitsu in 1999 where he
increased the focus on KSA and the
Gulf dramatically. n
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