By S.Priyan, Industry Analyst

The growing importance of the business analytics and intelligence solutions among the healthcare providers in Europe, only reiterates the fact that healthcare institutions is undergoing a metamorphosis - From a  mere care delivery centres to consumer driven, business performance centres. Business analytic solutions could be considered as the face of business intelligence solutions. The business analytics solutions assist the healthcare providers to make the best use of the available medical data – structured and unstructured. This is put to great use for clinical decisions at the point of care. The usability of the available medical data has been improved from just 20.0% usable to complete usable data.

Vendors such as Business Objects (SAP), Cerner Corporation, Cognos (IBM), McKesson Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Oracle Corporation, and SAP, SAS, Sybase Inc, Siemens and so on provide business analytics and intelligence solutions for the healthcare sector in Europe. Business analytic solution installations provide Return on Investments (ROI), with a median of 5 years, from 10.0% to 1000.0%. Through business analytics solutions, healthcare managers and analysts derive knowledge and conclusions that assist them to make informed and innovative business decisions. Business Analytics is a vast sector ranging from statistics to data visualization and is an significant function of an healthcare organization’s framework.

European Business Analytic Markets

Business analytics solutions market in Europe in still in its infancy stages. However, it is one of the fastest growing markets in Europe, because of increasing significance on patient safety and controlling cost. The factors that are driving the growth of the European market include increasing awareness among healthcare providers and patients, pay for performance initiatives and high ROIs. Factors that curb the growth of the market include, high initial and on-going costs, vague market requirements etc. Business analytic markets in Europe can broadly be segmented as financial analytic and administrative analytic solutions.

Emerging concepts such as Service Line Reporting (SLR) and Patient Level Costing (PLC) can be efficiently implemented only through business analytic solutions. SLR measures the profitability of each of its service lines than at an aggregated level and helps making informed decisions. SLR can be implemented independently of PLC.  But, PLC provides a more detailed and sophisticated basis for the analysis of SLR. PLC is a direct and sophisticated approach of billing based on the actual patient interactions and events of individual patients and the associated costs. The challenge in producing comprehensive PLC is the lack of specific clinical/activity information. That’s exactly where a proper business analytic solution helps. Advance data analysis has led to evidence & protocol-based and personalized medicine.

Some of the business analytics modules include Data Warehousing and management, reporting modules, information management analytics, financial performance, strategy management applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) analytics, workforce analytics, supply chain management etc. Data warehouses initially included financial analytical applications. But currently they are increasingly being integrated with clinical systems and operational applications – it denotes that the healthcare is moving from a wholesale to a retail environment.

Chart 1 shows the various analytic tools for the healthcare sector (Europe), 2009

                                      Source: Frost & Sullivan

Some of the integral modules of business analytic solutions include:

• Business Operations Reporting
• Forecasting
• Dashboards
• Data Storage and Analysis

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Business Intelligence comprises of several things such as the processes, software and technologies for collection, storage, analysis and access to processed, integrated data. Huge volumes of healthcare data that are disintegrated for years, can be integrated and better applied for decision making. Data warehousing helps to easily integrate disintegrated data – the older disintegrated systems were called "legacy systems". Growing into a necessity for healthcare data management, data warehousing is now a traditional acumen in effective information processing – though healthcare providers have been late adopters of the technology.

Healthcare data are more sensitive and significant than data from any other sector – Healthcare data includes more images and text, from various sources such as hospitals, outpatient clinics, doctor's offices, emergency rooms. The value propositions provided by analytic solutions include right information at the right time, easier, quicker and efficient decision making process, cost containing and improved ROI and better management of resources.

While business analytic solutions are the face of business intelligence, in turn, business intelligence solutions depend on the data warehouse repositories, which store, arrange, analyse and correlate the sensitive healthcare data. Other sectors such as retail and airlines have adopted analytic solutions as a pert of their workflow, but the market for healthcare is just in its infancy stage. Besides, business analytic solutions for healthcare are more complicated than any other sector, in terms of the types of input data, inimitable activities and the gravity of the decisions and application. While healthcare has been one of the late adopters of business analytics and intelligence solutions, the adoption rate is currently picking acceleration, making European healthcare one of the highly potential markets for business analytics solution providers.

Conclusion

Business analytic solutions includes the processes, software and technologies that collect, store, analyze the healthcare data and help the users make better decisions – in short turning raw data into strategic knowledge. Business analytics solutions have become increasingly important for the healthcare sector in Europe. They provide high value propositions to the healthcare sector apart from various other performance benefits. The analytics solution functions as financial management or administrative management system. Most systems take clinical solutions as one of the above modules. Analytics solutions have given ROIs from 10.0% to 1000.0%.

They are very easy to install and very effective to any healthcare set-up. Germany and the United Kingdom are one of the biggest markets for business analytics solutions for healthcare in Europe, while Italy and Spain are upcoming markets. The market in Europe is still in its early stage. Hence the adoptions as well as regulations are just getting stronger – there is even confusion in the market on the requirements of the analytics solution. The world market for business analytics solution [including healthcare] is estimated to be about $20.00 billion in 2009 and is expected to increase rapidly by 2015. Hence business analytic solutions are growing into one of the integral modules of healthcare environment in Europe.