How embedded reporting can drive process improvement in the healthcare industry

A recent study by the leading healthcare analytics firm Arcadia revealed that while over 90% of healthcare professionals recognize the importance of leveraging high-quality data across all their platforms, less than 60% of organizations use their data to inform their business processes. This indicates a breakdown between the acknowledged value of data within healthcare and how best to make use of it.

One of the reasons for this breakdown could be the inability to glean insights from organizations' data scattered across multiple data silos and applications. Fortunately, there's a solution to this problem — embedded reporting. 

By infusing charts, dashboards, and other analytics into your current applications, embedded reporting can help simplify provider workflows, reduce the cost of bloated IT stacks, yield more granular insights into how providers can improve their healthcare operations, and help streamline compliance with pixel-perfect reporting.

Why embedded reporting? 

The number varies by a company's size, but the average mid-market organization uses over 200 different tools to complete its day-to-day processes. Many of these tools have limited capabilities, forcing employees to toggle between applications to accomplish tasks. Embedded reporting integrates data from these various tools into a single application or intranet interface to drive insights from the available information more efficiently. 

Some examples of embedded reporting include: 

• Dashboards that quickly and intuitively display key performance metrics

• Charts that compare large amounts of data to better explain technical findings 

• Graphs that illustrate trends and enable better data storytelling

• Reports that maintain records and demonstrate proof of compliance with pixel-perfect precision

While many applications have some of these functionalities built-in, few include all the exact capabilities each team needs. Some may require employees to export the data collected by one application into another for processing, further reducing a healthcare team's efficiency.

Embedded reporting eliminates these barriers, creating both a simplified tech stack for your employees and enabling quicker insights that drive action.

How to apply embedded reporting to healthcare

Many healthcare applications require extensive manual data entry and have limited flexibility and performance analytics functionalities, forcing healthcare providers to transmit the data to other tools. This process is highly time-consuming and increases the workload for providers.

Embedded reporting tools with pixel-perfect design capabilities can help circumvent this barrier entirely, reducing the demands placed on healthcare professionals by allowing teams to: 

• Implement dashboards to view patients' lab results and regularly report key outcomes plus treatment results to healthcare regulators

• Automate report generation and produce precise, publication-quality documents that meet exact specifications for format, layout, and branding 

• Generate charts and graphs that display operational metrics to improve performance and healthcare data for hard-to-reach demographics

• Simplify operational workflows and more easily communicate key results throughout the entire healthcare organization

By consolidating available information into a single tool and enhancing reporting efficiency, healthcare providers have the ability to deliver faster, more granular insights on patients, processes, and performance to more easily address inefficiencies and identify areas for growth. 

The need for process improvement (PI) in healthcare

The sheer volume of healthcare data providers must manage has become unsustainable using siloed tools — and more human force isn't the answer. About 64% of healthcare leaders say there will never be enough staff to handle the amount of data at their organizations, forcing a shift in healthcare processes to be more efficient and to lighten the load. 

PI seeks to review a facility's healthcare operations to ensure that patients receive the best care possible. It also identifies potential areas for improvement within operations to enhance patient care outcomes and reduce the demands placed on providers. This is essential at a time when statistics show data and administrative processes can bog down providers and hinder their ability to deliver quality patient care.

The Internet of Healthcare Report, produced by independent research firm Wakefield Research, surveyed 1,700 patients, healthcare professionals, administrative staff and executives about their views regarding the healthcare patient and employee experience. The findings were instructive:

• 92% of clinicians agree that too much time spent on administrative tasks is a major contributor to healthcare worker burnout.

• 91% of healthcare professionals agree that fixing the burden of time-intensive, manual administrative processes is the most important thing they can do to improve the quality of patient care.

• 93% of healthcare professionals believe applying automation to remedy these processes will be good for their careers, with 49% of executives fearing that failure to do so will result in greater employee turnover.

All these figures point to the need for healthcare administrators to carefully review each phase of their operations and search for areas for improvement to alleviate the demands placed on providers. This is the exact aim of PI — and embedded reporting helps to drive it.

How embedded reporting enhances process improvement

Embedded reporting tools improve data accessibility to provide clearer insights and better context to help advance innovation. Some specific benefits that embedded reporting tools offer PI are:

• Enhanced operational efficiency: When employees have fewer applications to toggle between to fulfill their responsibilities, they have more time to accomplish more pressing tasks — like caring for patients. 

• Improved decision-making: Embedded reporting tools provide context by combining multiple sources of information into one application. This empowers administrators and providers by giving them the information they need to gauge project progress and understand potential hazards, delivering actionable information on how to better serve their patients.

• Better insights: Real-time dashboards, charts, and graphs can clarify the efficacy to executives and non-technical stakeholders. Using compelling data visualizations, providers can reduce errors and even predict health issues while more easily sharing valuable insights across an organization that lead to data-driven care plans.

• Compliance and risk management: Accessible data can help account for all necessary regulations and ensure compliance with internal and external policies.

• Stronger security: Admins can use embedded reporting tools to manage permission levels within their access request systems. This reduces the likelihood of unauthorized access to sensitive data resources, allowing for stronger identity and access management (IAM) protocols and a reinforced cybersecurity posture.

• Competitive advantage and cost savings: Once you integrate embedded reporting tools into your applications, you no longer have to supplement your initial software with additional products. That means fewer software products and vendors, which can lower the costs of your tech stack. Embedded reporting tools also give healthcare organizations a complete and up-to-date picture of their data, allowing them to swiftly respond to market changes and understand emerging opportunities that can lead to revenue growth.

• Better patient care: Embedded reporting tools give healthcare providers much-needed health data, enabling them to make better decisions, reduce errors, and better predict patient health issues. The result is improved patient health outcomes and higher patient satisfaction, which ultimately leads to higher reimbursement rates. 

All these benefits combine to enable healthcare organizations to be more data-driven, informed, and agile, which helps them conquer some of the industry’s biggest challenges to improve patient health outcomes and reduce provider workload.

Factors to consider with embedded reporting

There are several factors to consider when integrating embedded reporting tools into your applications:

• Pixel-perfect capabilities: From PDFs to PowerPoint presentations, healthcare PI reports can come in many formats. Embedded reporting tools should let you design any report you need and export it to any format your organization requires with pixel-perfect precision. 
• Ad hoc reporting: Healthcare PI reports often investigate specific incidents or individual processes. Embedded reporting tools should be able to support one-off ad hoc reporting to give insights on demand.
• Seamless integration: Compatibility is essential for any product when organizations need to coalesce various tools and applications in their stack. A healthcare PI strategy should support embedded analytics that seamlessly integrate into the rest of the organization's  IT environment.
• Interoperability: Embedded reporting tools use data connectors to integrate data from disparate silos, and the right solution must be compatible with existing applications in your environment. This enables users to generate a comprehensive report from all the available information. 
• Security: Any tool that handles protected health information (PHI) data must comply with all regulatory requirements. Your embedded reporting tool should help administrators manage data access permissions and facilitate the authorization and authentication protocols needed to maintain compliance. 
• Build vs. buy: Some healthcare organizations may prefer to build reporting within their application while others may opt for a more out-of-the-box solution. Time to deployment, size, scope, and breadth of IT resources vary with each organization, and there are many factors to consider when deciding to "Build" vs "Buy."

When incorporating embedded reporting, organizational buy-in at the executive level is imperative. Not quantifying the status quo costs and forgoing the deployment of an embedded reporting technology leads to missed opportunities, increased costs, and decreased productivity. 

Strengthen your healthcare processes with embedded reporting

The healthcare industry consists of extraordinarily dedicated professionals who provide life-saving patient care — and without intervention, their workload becomes unsustainable. Embedded reporting tools can help drive process improvement through quicker insights into operational bottlenecks within a healthcare facility and enable better patient care through improved decision-making. 

Success is based on decisions made and actions taken. That’s why it’s so important that information is presented clearly, quickly, and cohesively whenever it’s needed. With Jaspersoft, healthcare organizations can design, embed, manage, and deploy high-volume pixel-perfect reports and self-service ad hoc reports and dashboards with developer-level control on the most flexible and customizable BI platform available. Contact us today to learn more about how Jaspersoft can drive performance improvement for your healthcare organization.

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