CCD Health´s 7 Steps to a Successful Business Intelligence Process

Every medical center contains and collects a large amount of data. This data is then used to shed insights on how your facility is operating—what’s working and what’s not. However, in order to effectively use these insights, you have to view them in an organized, actionable way. Not every medical center has its data organized as such, which can make it difficult to pinpoint opportunities and make data-driven decisions. 

This is where developing a successful business intelligence (BI) plan comes into play. As your facility continues to collect data, you’ll be able to meet your objectives and operate more efficiently—all while ensuring quality patient experience and increased satisfaction.

This blog will show you the seven steps for Business Intelligence that CCD Health uses with our clients to drive results. 

A brief overview of business intelligence 

Before we jump into our successful BI process, let’s take a look at business intelligence as a whole. BI is a technology-driven process that analyzes and transforms data into actionable information. This information helps businesses make strategic and tactical decisions to enhance financial results.

The term business intelligence represents a wide range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest access to insights about an organization based on the available data. These tools can access and analyze datasets and present their analytical findings in summaries, graphs, and charts that will help you determine the state of your business and make decisions to scale its growth. 

Knowing this, let’s look at how CCD Health’s process occurs and the benefits our clients see from this help.

Seven steps to apply business intelligence and drive results

1. Identify the use case

A mistake many medical facilities make is not assessing their current needs and goals before they view the data. 

For a successful BI plan, the very first step is to identify the use case based on market needs through interactions with clients as well as market expertise.

Do this by spending time with your team, getting to know individual pain points and your most pressing needs based on your facility and your market.  Look through your current tools, take a measure of your current patient satisfaction, and conduct a thorough check-up on your operation’s health. 

2. Form a hypothesis 

After you’ve spent time identifying issues or pain points, come up with your best hypothesis to help find the root of your problems. Additionally, take a look at how these problems might affect future business and potential issues. 

By hypothesizing current and potential issues and problems, it makes it easier for everyone involved to see tangible solutions based on your needs. For example, if you realize that patient scheduling consistently causes issues with patient satisfaction, you can reasonably form the hypothesis linking the two of them, and examine potential solutions. 

3. Look at the data

The next thing you need to do is identify data points that will support testing the hypothesis, as well as its underlying drivers.

Your hypothesis needs to be backed up with data, not just a gut feeling. This step of the process is crucial to your business intelligence approach. You need to make sure that you have plenty of measurable data points to support the hypothesis and help identify underlying problems.

This will give you a frame of reference when you start looking through your medical facility’s data. You will be able to create a big picture as you find supporting evidence for the hypothesis. 

To go back to the scheduling example in step 2, you would identify data points such as staff schedules, call volume, and average time before answering calls to support the hypothesis that patient scheduling is affecting satisfaction.

4. Collect data

After you’ve identified the data points that are important to the hypothesis, it’s time to dig into your data and look for patterns.

In this step, you will collect data from these data points using automated and manual tools, such as your telephony platform, RIS System, CRM, or even spreadsheets.

Look through all your existing data for patterns and supporting evidence that your hypothesis is on the right track. To do this, you’ll need to apply statistical techniques and Machine Learning Algorithms to help you identify such patterns in your data. 

During this process, you might uncover evidence for or against your hypothesis, and adjust your analysis accordingly, which leads us to the next step.

5. Draw conclusions 

Once you’ve tested your hypothesis, and analyzed all the necessary data, draw preliminary conclusions and come up with additional hypotheses as necessary. 

This is where you’ll look at the data to tell a story and see if your initial hypothesis were on the right track or if the data reveals additional information. At this step, you might further hypothesize; after all, the more you uncover, the more thorough your solutions will be.

6. Present findings

Once you’ve explored all possible hypotheses relating to your problem, collected the data, and drawn preliminary conclusions, it’s time for the solutions. Come up with a plan that targets all problem areas and will result in favorable outcomes.

Then, present the conclusions and suggested action items to your decision-makers. 

The goal here is to lay out your findings and the best possible path to get results. The solutions will be backed by data collected from your facility and include clear key performance indicators (the data you measured in step 4) to track progress.

7. Implement solutions

The last step is implementation. After you’ve implemented the suggested actions, we recommend conditioning to collect data and provide results to your decision-makers on a regular basis.

Continue to monitor the data as you work towards your goals. If you are working with a knowledge provider like CCD Health, you’ll gain both solutions to your problems and proven results with a supportive partner.

Benefits of implementing a robust business intelligence strategy 

Now that you know CCD Health’s steps for a comprehensive and successful business intelligence strategy, here are some possible end results and benefits your medical facility could experience:

• Reduce patient  no-show rates
• Increase referrals
• Drive revenue from new and existing initiatives
• Higher patient satisfaction
• Better resource utilization
• Improving business performance

Grow your business with CCD Health’s BI

Sometimes, gaining a competitive edge is all about examining your current processes and looking for ways to improve. With a business intelligence partner like CCD Health, you’ll be able to meet your goals and problem-solve with ease. 

CCD Health is the leading medical contact center for outpatient healthcare providers, offering exceptional patient and customer experience. Our business intelligence process will allow you to receive a fully-fledged Analytics and Workforce Optimization function to drive optimal staffing and customer care, without the setup costs and operational burdens.

To learn more about how our team of experts can help you understand and improve your Customer Experience (CX), contact us.