Healthcare Analytics Tools: Don’t Underestimate the ROI of Convenience

When evaluating their healthcare analytics tools, hospitals and health networks naturally focus on measuring ROI. However, if this process is exclusively about investment costs, then it is not capturing the full story — because it is not just about money: it is also about convenience.

At first glance, this may seem unusual — or perhaps simply mistaken. After all, how important is convenience when it comes to optimizing healthcare analytics tools and exploiting their full value? Well, if you ask the people who must use such tools on day-to-day basis, the answer is a clear and emphatic: it matters enormously!

A Glimpse of the Pain and Suffering

Indeed, the level of pain and suffering that some end users endure at the hands of their healthcare analytics tools is surprising – if not shocking. Here are just some of the common complaints:

• Conducting “trial and error” experiments with different tools just to figure out what they do.
• Difficulty managing multiple logins and passwords.
• Wasting time manually cutting, pasting, printing, exporting, keying, re-calculating, etc.
• Performing re-work because of manual data entry errors.
• Struggling with data inconsistencies – or being oblivious to them.
• Missing insights and opportunities for improvements.
• Getting frustrated and feeling powerless to get the critical information they need, when they need it.

In light of these challenges, it is hardly surprising that many frustrated end users avoid analytics tools as much as possible, and instead rely on guestimates, anecdotal evidence and gut feels vs. actual data. This is not because they are “anti-technology.” Rather, they are simply being pragmatic and reacting to the unfortunate reality that instead of using tools, they are being used by them. In other words, the tools are not providing solutions – they are contributing to problems.

Obviously, this battle between end users and analytics tools cannot continue — because the costs and consequences to organizations are immense, and adversely impact everything from productivity, performance and quality, to recruitment, morale and retention. As such, the only way forward is to give end users the convenience they need, while ensuring that healthcare analytics tools in the environment are fully utilized and exploited. That is where partnering with Polaris makes a transformative difference.

The Polaris Solution

Polaris centralizes numerous tools in the environment into our single, comprehensive and easy-to-use tool set, which eliminates the excessive complexity, inconvenience and costs of managing multiple tools. All disparate healthcare data is automatically combined from multiple clinical, financial, quality and human resource systems, and made available to end users across the organization via clear up-to-date reports and dashboards.

At the same time, our expert team provides the following at no additional fee within our inclusive cost model:

• Creates and maintains all reports, data imports and data normalizations.
• Keeps the tool and reports optimized for rapid responsiveness.
• Maintains the technical currency of the tool set.
• Provides all support, maintenance and upgrades.

The Bottom Line

The concept of “ROI of convenience” may seem like a nice-to-have aspect, and therefore not a top priority or a serious focus. However, as noted above, this is about far more than mere comfort or familiarity. The extent to which analytics tools are convenient or inconvenient has a direct impact on whether organizations will view them as assets or liabilities. At Polaris, we ensure that our clients are firmly in the former group, and never the latter — which is welcome news for executives and end users alike!

To learn more about our solutions, technologies and approach, contact the Polaris team today.