Predictive Analytics in Healthcare: Boundless Possibilities

For centuries, the outcome of every patient's diagnosis and treatment depended solely upon the healer's own experience, judgement, and skills. Eventually, though, healthcare professionals came to rely on evidence-based research in combination with their own experience and judgement. This made possible greater precision in patient care.

Today, a new player, predictive analytics, is poised to radically upend healthcare once again.

What Does Predictive Analytics Make Possible in Healthcare?

Today, the literature in the field of medicine is a buzz with the possibilities made available by the merger of informatics with healthcare. Because most healthcare companies now rely on electronic records, the gathering of massive amounts of detailed data has become commonplace. This wealth of accumulated knowledge makes predictive analytics in healthcare possible.

But experts are only beginning to tease out the possibilities predictive analytics will provide for healthcare.

As just one example of those possibilities, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association published in December 2019, the authors discuss the use of predictive analytics to minimize the length of patients' stays in emergency rooms.

In an earlier paper, Linda A. Winters-Miner, PhD, described seven distinct ways predictive analytics can radically improve healthcare overall:

1.    Healthcare professionals will be able to make more accurate diagnoses.

2.    Predictive analytics will improve preventive care and overall public health.

3.    Doctors will be able to prescribe more precise, and therefore more efficacious, treatments for their patients who have unique maladies.

4.    Employers, clinics, and hospitals will be better able to predict insurance costs.

5.    Predictive analytics will quickly develop models of healthcare that do not require hundreds or even thousands of cases in order to provide accuracy. In contrast, evidence-based research often requires thousands of cases and years of accumulated data. Moreover, because it incorporates machine learning, predictive analytics will allow these models to become more accurate over time.

6.    With predictive analytics, pharmaceutical companies will be able to make better predictions about which medications they need to make available to the public in the near future and in what quantities those drugs will be needed.

7.    More patients will be able to enjoy individualized treatment and better outcomes, and healthcare professionals will find more satisfaction in their work.

Are You a Healthcare Professional Who Seeks More Satisfaction in Your Work?

If you're a doctor or other trained healthcare professional, you likely entered your profession because you wanted to use your sharp intellect and your compassionate nature to help people monitor and care for their health.

You have at your fingertips vast mountains of knowledge to help you in your work. However, you must also keep up with the demands of government regulations and ever-evolving changes to insurance codes.

Add to these factors the speed with which you must work because of the numbers of patients you are compelled to see, especially in perilous times. Therefore, much to your dismay, you sometimes fall short. Your diagnoses are sometimes inaccurate, the treatments you prescribe inaccurate or even harmful.

It's not that you don't give it your all, all of the time. It's just that your human brain simply can't connect all the dots quickly enough to allow you to make the most accurate diagnoses and come up with the best possible treatments for each patient as quickly as circumstances demand.

Imagine Being Able to Better Manage Patient Care for Future Well-Being

Many would argue that healthcare as it is currently practiced is "sickness care," not truly healthcare. But imagine being able to help your patients manage their health for better future outcomes. Predictive analytics make this possible.

In the very near future, you will rely not only on genetics and evidence-based research but also on the power of predictive analytics. Then, guided as well by your own expertise, you will prescribe specific treatments for each of your patients. These might include lifestyle changes, dietary improvements, and exercise as well as nutritional supplements and preventative medications.

To quote Dr. Winters-Miner, from her paper referenced above:

"Predictive analytics (PA) uses technology and statistical methods to search through massive amounts of information, analyzing it to predict outcomes for individual patients. That information can include data from past treatment outcomes as well as the latest medical research published in peer-reviewed journals and databases.

"Not only can PA help with predictions, but it can also reveal surprising associations in data that our human brains would never suspect."

With predictive analytics, patients will receive individualized treatments. Perhaps surprisingly, better overall public health will be a natural outcome.

This will come about because doctors' assessments of their patients' health will become more accurate and their prescribed treatments more narrow and specific. Then, medications will no longer be prescribed "shotgun style" to large numbers of people in the hope that a few people in that population will benefit. As a result, fewer people will be exposed to the risk of side effects from prescribed medications that are not right for them.

These outcomes and more are made possible by the power of predictive analytics in healthcare.

How Can Your Healthcare Business Take Advantage of the Power of Predictive Analytics?

More than half of enterprises in all verticals that rely on predictive analytics enjoy better customer loyalty and retention. Naturally, this is important in healthcare, too, because your patients have choices about where they go to receive their care.

If your healthcare business is not already using software that develops over time through artificial intelligence and machine learning, there are experts who will help you to develop it. And if you are currently using these powerful tools, a custom-designed predictive analytics program will boost your software's machine learning education to the next level.

While every healthcare business is unique and there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the experts at InData Labs will work with you to develop and customize your predictive analytics software so that it does precisely what your healthcare business needs it to do.

What's more, because your predictive analytics software will now fully integrate machine learning capabilities, your software will be fully automated. In other words, you will be able to set it to run and seldom have to think about it again.

What Can You Expect from the Scientists at InData Labs?

InData Labs offers custom solutions for businesses of all types, including hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare businesses. Their experts will work with your healthcare business from start to finish to develop predictive analytics software to provide state-of-the-art patient care.

Before they even begin, however, they will strategize with you about exactly how you plan to use the data you have available to you. This end-to-end process will provide your business with tailor-made software that will provide better patient outcomes overall, as well as access to more resource-effective processes.

In short, while you will still rely heavily on your own expertise and judgement when treating patients, you will now have at your disposal a precision tool that assures more accurate diagnoses, specialized treatments, and far better patient outcomes than you now experience.