Quicker and more meaningful insights

Data overload: An opportunistic challenge

There’s a robust infrastructure in the healthcare industry to capture large volumes of data, but that can pose a challenge on how to digest and act on it all. Whether that’s clinical data, revenue cycle data, patient engagement data, integration data, or another business consideration, there’s almost too much information.

“Even the most seasoned data analytic expert would admit that there's too much data out there,” says Aamer Hayat, Chief Administrative Officer at Northern California Retina Vitreous Associates. “As someone whose role involves digesting and acting on that data,” he continues, “a lot of us who are responsible for managing the organization spend a lot of time trying to put all that data together to make sense of it."

Alicia Daniel, the Chief Financial Officer at OrthoLoneStar, saw the same challenge at her organization. She spent more time mining for data and identifying the right data than gleaning insights for data-driven decision making.

That’s why both Northern California Retina Vitreous Associates and OrthoLoneStar reached out to athenahealth’s Advisory Services for strategic guidance. Daniel says, “Trying to take the sources and data points and transfer them to something that was meaningful for the entire organization, ultimately that drove us to seeking out services with athenahealth.”

Identifying what data is important to the business

Advisory Services experts partner with organizations to consult on a business challenge, such as streamlining workflows or developing dashboards to surface key business insights.

For leaders such as Hayat and Daniel, this means not only time back in their days but also quicker access to more meaningful insights. The Advisory Services consultants quickly helped them identify what information is most important to their practices and the best way to report on that workstream. They have a deep industry knowledge as well as athenahealth product expertise, which can help bridge the gap between swimming in a sea of data to carving out digestible streams of insights.

“Being able to hone in on what’s important to you as a practice, that’s where the Advisory Services expertise is, and we’ve already started to see some impact,” Hayat says.

Daniel shares similar sentiments: “Using athenahealth’s Advisory Services is helping us grow our business in so many ways, it's limitless. Having insight into the performance of the organization readily available at my fingertips has allowed for me to more quickly assess what could be an issue.”

Saving time both developing and accessing meaningful insights

Since their Advisory Services engagement, Hayat and Daniel both feel they’re more empowered to make timely data-driven decisions with the information at their fingertips. They have tailored dashboards for their organization developed in partnership with Advisory Services consultants, which surface real-time insights on the metrics they care about.

According to Hayat, “Working with the professionals at Advisory Services really helped guide us to where we want to get to and sort of kept us on track. It takes a significant burden off our workload to really focus on what's important.” This not only saved time in Hayat’s day-to-day in finding information and gleaning insights, but also established a scalable reporting process as they continue to grow and adapt to the industry.

Daniel shares that the transformation since their Advisory Services engagement has allowed her to work at her highest potential: “Being able to take that as a useful tool to make business decisions has given me time back to really work at the highest and best use for my role, which is using the data to make business decisions, not mining the data myself."

Do you have more data than you know what to do with? We can help!

If you’re interested in learning more about how your organization could get time back and have meaningful insights at your fingertips, learn more about athenahealth’s Advisory Services.