Utilizing Big Data to Improve Patient Outcomes in Home Healthcare

The benefits of big data in healthcare have been established in the literature, although challenges remain in the collection and standardization of data. Similarly improved patient outcomes can result from the purposeful use of big data related to home healthcare.

The healthcare industry can benefit from using big data to economize, target marketing, and better understand the needs of home healthcare patients.

Home Healthcare

Home healthcare is characterized by care providers tending to patient health at a home rather than a hospital or skilled nursing facility. The individualized patient care approaches illness or injury in an often less expensive, more comfortable, and longer-term way.

Big Data in Healthcare

Large data sets can be leveraged with big data analytics to reveal trends, patterns, and correlations.

Clinical systems in healthcare are responsible for data management; health data is most often documented in the Electronic Health Record (EHR). When healthcare data is correctly standardized and stored, researchers can come to valuable insights and physicians can inform daily actions.

Using Data to Determine Medical Best Practices

Big Data in Home Healthcare

Algorithms can be created to mine clinical notes and patient health information for patterns in symptoms that might predict patient outcomes or developing ailments.

Nursing analytics can also be used to create a clinical decision support tool for the caregivers of patients turning to home care. Predictive analytics could be used to identify high-risk patients who require immediate care based on clinical notes that home care nurses take.

Data Challenges in Healthcare

The healthcare industry has been slow to adapt to changing technology regarding data analytics. This is in part due to the inherent challenges associated with collecting and mining healthcare data.

Even when patient data is digitized, which hasn’t been widespread in hospitals until recently, the lack of standardization makes data mining a difficult process. This also contributes to the difficulty of aggregating data sets, as hospitals often have trouble sharing data sets that aren’t quite compatible.

However, there is reason to be optimistic about the near-future of nursing informatics, as EHR use caught on rapidly in hospitals once the benefits of big data in healthcare were made more readily apparent.

Existing and potential regulations surrounding healthcare data are often reason to pause when collecting and aggregating patient information. Syntelli Solutions provides data management support and security to keep your company on top of the regulations.

What Makes Good Data

Not all data can have equally effective applications. Health data is notoriously hard to collect, as many clinical notes rely on unmeasurable observations and hospital-specific scales. Promoting standardization of patient experience documentation, both within facilities and between hospitals, will likely improve the utility of the available data.

Terminology is another aspect of clinical notes that must be standardized to create useful datasets. Going forward, nurses should be taught to document standard terms that fit each observation.

Keep in mind that data is only as good as the data analytics. Big data can be misleading if improperly interpreted, so it’s important to seek professional help when analyzing your data. Ideally, look for an expert trained in data analytics for the healthcare field; an informatics nurse or data company that works with healthcare data, like Syntelli Solutions, can help you make the most of your data.

About Syntelli Solutions

Syntelli Solutions can help you every step of the way; our data engineering services can help you organize and protect your data, and then our reporting and visualization services can help you come to data-driven decisions.

The Takeaway

Big data is not only accessible to big companies. With the support of Syntelli Solutions, you can leverage big data to improve patient outcomes and your bottom line in your home healthcare business.

The healthcare industry has begun to follow the footsteps of the commercial sector, but home healthcare services are largely missing out on the opportunities that data-driven approaches to healthcare can provide.

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