How data can help you prepare for the future of rural healthcare

Digital transformation remains a priority for rural healthcare organizations that want to stay viable.

Limited resources and staff mean that you need to find new ways to automate tasks and make smarter decisions for both your organization and your patients — and data can help.

As technology continues to disrupt rural health, data is a vital asset for helping your organization further its digital transformation and use the latest innovations to improve care, operations and financial performance.

The future of rural healthcare

Innovations such as telehealth and AI are already disrupting how care is delivered. But innovation isn’t slowing down, and as it continues, the industry faces further advancements in:

• Accessibility: Technology is already providing new ways to make care more accessible and this trend will likely accelerate. With the growth of telehealth and additional outpatient settings, a significant amount of care can be delivered remotely, leaving hospitals to focus more on acute and emergency treatment.
• Communication: Technology will continue to enable more enhanced communications with patients and in the workforce. Patients will seek seamless, personalized, omnichannel experiences and digital platform-based consumption will become widespread. The digitally enabled workforce will also be able to provide 24/7, 365-day care, agnostic of location.
• Care: Enhanced technology infrastructure, customer experience and AI will continue to mature, enabling greater innovation and improving the quality of care. Improvements will be driven by faster, easier access to care and the education and information needed for accurate diagnoses, precise treatment and enhanced monitoring.

Many of these changes are already happening in healthcare. If your organization wants to keep pace, it’s essential to continue making progress on your digital transformation.

The next step in your healthcare digital transformation                 

Data is critical to preparing your organization for the future.

After implementing your foundational healthcare technology of EMR, EHR and CRM solutions, data is the next step to helping you advance further in your digital transformation. With technology driving more telehealth, omnichannel communications and outpatient care delivery options, rural healthcare organizations will be producing immense amounts of data. And that data should be leveraged in your organization to support care delivery, decision-making, optimization and further innovation. 

Leveraging data requires it to pass between your foundational systems automatically and effectively so that you can access it easily. Extracting data from systems into reporting and dashboards that help support decision-making, transparency, automation and optimization is also crucial.

However, achieving that state can be uniquely challenging for rural healthcare organizations.

Rural health data is often complex and disparate, with a high amount of unstructured or semi-structured data, such as images, records and videos. And organizations often lack direct access to their data sources or experience significant hurdles due to their contract relationships in obtaining solutions such as EHR. They also face limited availability of skilled data analytics resources and internal data subject matter experts.

To improve your analytics, data management and governance, focus on tools, people and processes that enable:

• Accessibility: Essential discussions with your solution vendors amidst the buying cycle and post implementation are key in helping to ensure you have access to the data you need. Investing in your data foundation is a key element for getting the most out of your technology investments and one that quickly gains efficiencies of scale after initial setup efforts.
• Transparency: It’s essential to maintain transparency throughout the care process so that you can capture the data needed to enhance care. Transparency also allows for a more personalized care experience by making the entire care journey visible to patients.
• Integration and interoperability: Promoting interoperability and connectivity across different data sources — internal and external to your organization — is vital to fully leverage data as a strategic asset. Breaking down data silos and establishing clear data ownership and access controls can accelerate your digital transformation.
• Security: Robust data security measures are paramount to help ensure that patient data stays secure and confidential and that your organization meets compliance.
• Quality: Advanced data profiling and cleansing tools can significantly improve data quality, helping to ensure accuracy and enhanced decision-making.
• Visualization: Data is only as good as the decisions you can make from it. Data visualization allows people to see, interact with, understand and show their data so that they can draw out actionable insights.

The benefits of leveraging rural healthcare data

By leveraging healthcare data and analytics, your organization can implement and improve:

• 360-degree patient view: Easier access to records and information about a patient to provide complete and holistic care is essential for improving care and quality. Value-based care initiatives continue to emphasize the importance of care transitions and communication between varying levels of providers and care organizations to diminish gaps in care.
• Treatment and medication adherence: You can use internal and external patient data to increase treatment and medication adherence. For example, data on when prescriptions were filled and picked up can help you provide better patient follow-up.
• Community care: Improved data management helps you participate in building a community data network that connects social services, public health, healthcare, transportation, education and criminal justice. This network can help community organizations work together to share data and improve patient outcomes.
• Automation: With ongoing staffing challenges amidst increasing regulation and reporting requirements, efficiencies are needed in automating manual, time-consuming tasks. Data and reporting automation tools are pivotal in helping address this challenge.
• Decision support: Having easier access to data enables you to take advantage of new ways to use AI and automation. These innovations can provide more accurate data so that you can make more effective business and care decisions. They can also help you address staffing issues by performing specific administrative tasks and allowing providers and back-office employees to focus on more critical work.
• Finance and operations: Increased transparency, enhanced decision making and clarity in areas of optimization can help your organization maximize your available resources. This is critical at a time when organizations often need to support increased patient volumes with fewer staff. The ability to identify pain points and quickly get to the root cause and potential solutions in areas such as scheduling, staffing, revenue cycle, utilization and cost adds significant value. It also helps ensure the stability and viability of your organization so that you can continue to provide care.
• Employee and patient experience: Continuing to leverage available technology capabilities such as AI and reporting automation allows you to support employees in focusing their efforts at the “top of their licenses.”These capabilities can also enable staff to spend more time in direct patient care as opposed to focusing on heavy documentation and reporting efforts, allowing for improved patient experience and outcomes.

How Wipfli can help

Let Wipfli help you achieve the next stage in your rural healthcare organization’s growth. Whether you’re getting started by implementing an EHR or ERP, ready to further your data and analytics journey or need support in implementing sufficient security protocols, Wipfli is ready to help. Our dedicated team applies our deep industry experience to help you find new solutions for increasing your financial viability and enhancing the patient experience.

Visit our rural health provider solutions page to learn more about our services.