*Per Clayton Montarroyos
The positive impacts of Business Intelligence strategies (BI or business intelligence in Portuguese) in the Health sector can be evidenced through different analytical aspects, and hospital management is one of the areas that can benefit significantly from BI, through analysis incorporated into the flows of business processes and patient care.
In view of the challenging scenario of the pandemic, BI has become essential for a hospital to be assertive in managing the occupation of beds, the queue for hospitalization, in the identification of frauds, in monitoring the stocks of medicines and oxygen, in the occupation of ICUs, in the workload of the teams, just to name a few examples.
A good BI strategy in hospital management has the ability to provide quality and predictive information to administrators and the clinical staff, to improve the financial and operational performance of healthcare organizations and the quality of patient care.
One lifting carried out by the Federal Council of Medicine, with the support of the NGO Contas Abertas, points out that Brazil spends 8% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Health, of which 4.4% comes from private spending and 3.8% from public spending.
Even with this percentage, the country spends R$ 555.00 per capita, an insufficient and low value when compared to other countries, but which needs to be maximized, since there is no prospect of increasing public and private budgets with Health in the current scenario. Healthcare organizations must always do more with less. Therefore, access to information is essential for making solid evidence-based decisions.
Dealing with the challenges in this area with the major objective of significantly improving the health care offered to the population requires the existence of valid data sets, which are obtained from methodologies and systems that support the ability to apply the knowledge derived from these efforts in the decision-making, service, management, always adding more transparency in accountability of expenses.
We are currently in the eye of the pandemic hurricane with its urgencies. But, we can reflect on some debates that have occurred in the last few months about the data and reinforce a crucial request: organize the data so that we have reliable information in order to design the local and national strategies based on analyzes provided by the BI tools.
The debate on BI in hospital management falls on a phrase that we hear with a certain frequency: the data is not reliable. Why wouldn't they be? What should we change to have more confidence in the data? An organizational culture in each hospital guiding data-based management - what we can call a hospital data driven - needs to spread quickly across the country, with support from sectoral and governmental entities.
Business intelligence (BI) systems are designed to provide decision support information and have been repeatedly confirmed to provide value to organizations of all sizes and sectors.
Many healthcare organizations have not yet implemented BI systems. They do not yet have methodologies for standardizing processes, collection, repositories for storing data and the types of analysis of information that will be transformed into reports, which can and should be accessed in real time.
Health is an area that requires speed and assertiveness. Evidently, the scenario is complex, but this complexity must be seen as an obstacle, as a stimulus for advances in hospital management to occur.
Bill Gates has warned that it is not too early to think about the next pandemic. Despite being a statement that makes us concerned, the warning made still points out that it is possible that governments, organizations and people are not caught off guard.
BI is there to help reverse the negative effects of the so-called “surprise factor”, because in addition to helping with daily management, they provide qualified information that allows them to predict the future. We will rely on BI associated with other digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence.
* Clayton Montarroyos, CEO of IN - Business Intelligence
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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