Healthcare Data Management: Benefits and Challenges

Healthcare data collection and management are now more important than ever, as, besides traditional personal advice, services like telemedicine, remote health monitoring, and other medical areas based on modern technologies are becoming more and more popular.

People actively use wearable devices and healthcare apps to communicate with doctors, and electronic health records (EHRs) are the backbone of any modern hospital or health center management system. All of these trends have something in common, namely medical data distribution.

What is Healthcare Data Management and Why is It Important?

Healthcare Data Management (HDM) presumes systematic medical digital data management. Data management is not the only task here: data integration and analytics are equally important for healthcare facility operation enhancement, employees’ work efficiency improvement, and patient care quality growth.

You can collect data by using a wide variety of sources:

• Electronic health records (EHR)
• IoT and wearable devices
• CRM systems in hospitals
• HR and financial applications
• Third-party sources, etc.

Let us highlight five main stages of healthcare data management. If you implement them correctly, you will manage to get the highest value in this area:

1. Data collection, using various sources.
2. Data conversion into a format convenient for further processing.
3. Data storage (with a security emphasis).
4. Data analysis and its presentation in a human-friendly form.

Healthcare data management is important for obvious reasons. The importance of data available for any niche is hard to overestimate nowadays. It provides an opportunity to speed up and simplify data processing to improve the decision-making process, gain competitive advantages, and enhance the hospital’s efficiency as a whole.

Challenges in Healthcare Data Management

Unfortunately, when you implement a healthcare data management system, you can face several problems you have to be ready for.

• Fragmented data. Data can arrive from various sources and can be presented as tables, texts, images, videos, and other file types.
• Data volatility. Some data remains static, while other changes dynamically, can be duplicated and modified inconsistently, etc.
• Privacy and security rules. Patients’ health data protection is paramount and essential to customer trust retention. Internal security measures, auditing, and training define the most appropriate approach to addressing this issue.
• Systems integration. Even the same healthcare facility can utilize different tools to collect, store, and process data. This peculiarity can cause compatibility issues.
• Regulations and compliance. Healthcare data is specific, and many laws govern the way it is collected and used. That is why it is necessary to find a balance between compliance with requirements and usability. Some countries around the world have strict and complex regulatory environments preventing the full potential of healthcare data from being achieved.
• Healthcare data storage. The arrays of data collected may become huge and need large storage facilities. You can use out-of-the-box cloud solutions or order software development and custom databases.

If you attract experienced and qualified IT specialists to work on your project, you can cope with the challenges listed above in the most efficient way.

The Advantages of Improved Medical Data Management in Healthcare

Healthcare data management can provide lots of different benefits for healthcare companies, employees, and patients. Let us recollect the main ones.

1. Patient care improvement. Instantly available and more accurate data allows doctors to diagnose illnesses faster and provide more efficient treatment. The approach to treatment also becomes more personalized.
2. Cost reduction. Healthcare providers can operate at a lower cost due to data collected, reducing the cost of services for patients as well.

1. Expanded access to quality treatment. It is not a secret that healthcare services are expensive. Healthcare cost reduction through efficient data usage allows more people to get access to life-saving healthcare.
2. Proactive approach. Innovative predictive models based on Big Data technologies allow diagnosing diseases at early stages, avoiding unnecessary waste of time and money, and making more informed decisions when solving a variety of problems.
3. Better business solutions. Quality Big Data allows healthcare providers to make better business decisions:

• buy as many drugs as necessary when needed;
• assess doctors’ performance;
• analyze specific services for their profitability;
• identify problem areas and find opportunities for growth, etc.

Wrapping Up

Nowadays, we have a huge amount of data describing all aspects of the healthcare industry: patient data, doctors’ and clinics’ work, operational, financial, and other indicators. It is possible to use this data to diagnose diseases, improve healthcare quality, conduct predictive analytics, develop innovative solutions, and quickly adapt to the changing environment in which medical facilities operate.

Efficient healthcare data management offers impressive opportunities, and healthcare companies putting such solutions into practice will be able to fully appreciate all the benefits that these technologies provide.

Want to start a health data software development project? Our team is ready to implement your ideas. Contact us now to discuss your roadmap!