Data analytics a struggle for ANZ healthcare organisations

Tue, 9th Aug 2022

FYI, this story is more than a year old

A study by InterSystems has found that most Australian and New Zealand healthcare organisations struggle to use data analytics to support their business objectives.

The State of Healthcare Analytics - Interoperability Study - Australia and New Zealand has been conducted by InterSystems and tech advisory firm, Ecosystm.

The survey comprised 180 healthcare executives from public and private organisations, large and small hospitals, and city and rural locations.

It found some significant roadblocks preventing organisations from using data analytics to meet their top business objectives, such as improving clinical outcomes and optimising costs. These include:

A lack of trust in data
Challenges with data quality
The absence of a holistic digital transformation strategy

The survey has seen 79% of executive respondents say that data analytics is either intrinsic to all their business priorities or a top priority. Yet only 44% of respondents trust their data entirely, with 51% saying data quality is a challenge preventing them from successfully implementing analytics.

"Without trust in their data, healthcare organisations are squandering one of their most important assets and impeding their ability to achieve their main business objectives," InterSystems Australia and New Zealand country manager Darren Jones says.

The study also found that many companies' most important business objectives include the conflicting demands to make clinical outcomes better while bringing costs down.

64% of respondents said complying with government mandates was their top business objective, followed by 46% saying optimising cost, and 42% of those surveyed noted improving clinical outcomes was the most important.

Further, the top business objectives of healthcare organisations align with the outcomes they expect from analytics offerings.

These include 44% of respondents identifying patient risk, 41% saying improved patient outcomes and experience, 36% recognising reduced clinical errors and 34% noting reduced costs as an expectation from a data analytics platform.

"The study reveals a shift in mindset towards value-based healthcare, leveraging data analytics to improve outcomes at an optimised cost as a way to resolve conflicting business objectives," Jones adds.

"Unfortunately, most healthcare organisations don't yet have that capability."

In addition, the study reveals only 32% of healthcare organisations have a digital transformation strategy incorporating interoperability, data governance and analytics.

The absence of a holistic data strategy is a major roadblock for the remaining 68% of organisations, preventing them from achieving their business objectives.

"Building trust in data for effective analytics requires a data-driven organisational culture where people and processes are focused on accuracy across the data value chain and consistency across disparate data sources," Jones notes.

"That is virtually impossible without a holistic digital transformation strategy and next-generation platforms like InterSystems IRIS for Health or InterSystems HealthShare, which support advanced interoperability and data cleansing."

The publishing of this study comes after InterSystems released a suite of new offerings to facilitate improvements for financial services organisations in March.