Your hospital data (from all departments) is a key factor to understand high business performance, clinical performance, right investments areas, projections, key performance and improvements, expansion & growth strategy etc How many departments can project these analytics easily and help the decision makers and managers in decision making for next quarter or financial year easily.
Recently, I came across an article talking about how spreadsheets are wasting almost $60 billion every year. In this era of advanced analytics and smart tools, with AI coming into healthcare, the data from all sources is an important aspect of the hospital. But I see still a good number of healthcare organizations rely on using MS Excel as their analyzing & reporting and making business decisions tool.
For obvious reasons,
1. It’s cheaper than any analytics platform
2. Usability — the majority of people in healthcare know how to use excel
3. Most of the computer systems will have a copy of a parallel database of Excel in the organization, which makes it readily available
All the above reasons listed seems superficial level attractive but it comes with huge hidden costs and inefficiency across the organization, rather a hindrance to business prosperity.
1. Wastage of Time & Productivity Loss:
We have all been used to this saying that ‘Time is Money’, according to some study, resources in healthcare industry lose up to 20 to 35% of their total working time in just building data, reports, correcting and validating and moreover reviews takes another 5 to 10% of the time. Having so many formulae’s in place and even the slightest change could cause rework and leads to the exertion of employees. This amount of time can be easily saved by using a Healthcare CRM, as the time involved in data collection tasks can be automated from multiple sources of systems and can be unified and can build various analytics on it. Obviously as pointed out above, re-work and repurposing an excel sheet demands time which leads to temporary loss of productivity by the entire staff. This temporary loss can be easily prevented by using automated systems, which will definitely make your staff happy, enabled and moreover the management is confident about planning and strategies.
2. Lose of Data Quality, Data Integrity & Nightmare for employees:
Keeping the data up-to-date, data integrity, data entry errors, data reliability are all concerns of data in excels. I have a customer where the lead data generated from various sources are maintained in excels with a humongous process to see changes done on the excel by various leads generators, different sources and also another team to notify to relevant teams and another again based on another team the original team has to update the excel. To monitor discrepancy data integrity the excels copies are taken every 15 minutes. I see a simple nightmare. In DocEngage, we connect to all lead sources be in facebook, LinkedIn, AdWords or B2B field sales, call center, referral all pooled in DocEngage with the right source name. The team gets an auto notification so all hassles are gone within just one lead app with 15 to 20 integrations.
3. Can not rely on analytics, difficult to make a business decision:
When making a business decision, we need deeper data analytics, trends and realistic projections with varied dimensions of data and also drill down the lowest granular data. It is simply not possible in excels. Even you see sweet PPT with KPI’s still apprehension there about data reliability and also can be contested future. The same case, if you use a system, you can get answers for all your questions and hence you will build confidence to make a decision based on facts. Marketing ROI is never clearer or proven with data earlier, it is more of guesswork in excels. In DocEngage, the spent is connected to revenue generated from a lead converted to patients and provides authentic data and you can decide where to increase the budget and where not to.
I don’t discard excel completely, in fact for some tasks excel is a powerful tool, but it does have its major shortcomings which it hinders the pavement of performance, expansion, growth of a “Digital Hosptial”
Using a Healthcare Analytics Solution eases your daily activities and tasks involved, moreover, you don’t have to worry about data preparation since the solution automatically collects data from different sources and compiles it at one place.
Practice management, EHR, Healthcare CRM, Homecare and Hospital management systems.
