Driving Impact In Healthcare Through Smarter Data Practices

Thursday, 26 June 2025, 7:55 am
Article: Hugh Grant

Using data to make decisions isn’t a “nice to have” for most businesses or organizations - it is absolutely essential. Healthcare, and specifically skilled nursing facilities, are no exception to this rule. Data can be used in many ways to improve patient outcomes, which should be the main goal of any healthcare organization. Some of the benefits of good data use for patients include better treatment effectiveness, earlier diagnosis, a more efficient clinical trial process, and a reduction in the time to market for new therapies. There are clearly some amazing uses for data, but it is not always easy for large organizations to have good data practices.

80% of healthcare executives don’t fully trust their organization’s data or believe it is being used effectively. This criticism may sound harsh, but leadership is justified for being hesitant to use less than stellar data. There are some serious repercussions that can come from the mishandling or collection of poor data. For example, patients can receive misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, and medication errors, which can all severely impact their health. Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, so these mistakes can expose an organization to reputational risk and lawsuits.

There are a few reasons why an organization’s data might not be in the ideal state. Healthcare companies need to collect data from many sources, including census, clinical, reimbursement, staffing, and financial data. Some large companies use over 40 different platforms to manage their essential functions, which can be exhausting for knowledge workers to have to constantly log into. This can amount to about 30% of their workweek being spent searching for the right data to be able to do their jobs. These slow processes can lead to more manual errors and, in some cases, data breaches.

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One way to condense down on all of these disparate data sources is to perform an audit of which platforms are being used and keep a watchful eye on redundancies and gaps. It is important to make sure that all essential functions are being covered and fully integrated, but some platforms may not be extremely value add. Cutting down on these and streamlining the number of necessary platforms can lead to a much more efficient data gathering process. Upgrades should be considered for software that is able to communicate with other systems and reduce manual data entry.

Another method is to invest in a data warehouse. These warehouses are centralized repositories for all the data an organization might need to easily access. They can cut down on the time knowledge workers spend per week on chasing down the right data. Some warehouses may even have built in analytics to help knowledge workers turn the information into insights. However, building a data warehouse can be a huge investment of time, money, and resources, sometimes taking up to three years to build. Outsourcing the integration of a data warehouse to a third party vendor can simplify this process to as little as 3 months.

After making these changes to the data structure of a healthcare organization, it won’t be long before the benefits begin to show. One area that might see improvement is the staffing process for healthcare workers. Better data resources may improve the ability to reduce overtime, increase retention, and optimize average nursing hours per patient day for each facility. Proactive care planning and improved profitability are two other areas that can also be enhanced by analyzing data correctly. One step toward accomplishing this is to track KPIs and share them with the team on a regular basis, so everyone is on the same page about how to drive improvements.

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