5 Ways EMR Analytics SHOULD Enhance Hospital Productivity & Performance

Many hospitals are underwhelmed with their EMR analytics experience so far. Instead of improving efficiency and making life easier, their EMR systems have created an overly complex reporting structure – one that can be time consuming to understand, and require too much manual labor to implement.

Despite these criticisms, in our experience, the root problem is not necessarily that the system has inherently inefficient analytics. Rather, some EMR reporting systems are not optimized in 5 key areas:  

1. Cost Savings

Hospitals operate on strict budgets and must constantly find ways to do more with less. Optimized EMR analytics reporting can measurably reduce operational costs. In a study by researchers at the University of South Carolina, published in the American Journal of Managed Care, they found hospitals that successfully implemented an EMR system, with advanced, customized analytics, reduced their “per patient admission” expenses by as much as 10 percent.

2. Better Communication

Effective communication is essential in hospital environments, where timely dissemination of accurate information is required. Optimized EMR analytics can provide the necessary data for a cross-functional team to stay informed, thereby reducing miscommunication, delays and errors. It allows patient information to be rapidly and accurately transferred between different professionals and teams.

3. Improved Patient Care

Optimized EMR analytics directly impacts and improves the quality of patient care, by:

• Providing clinicians with both real-time and historical data, documenting the full continuum of care for a patient.
• Summarizing clinical data in a dashboard or “snapshot” format, that quickly identifies significant trends or volumes.
• Supplying data to quality assurance and regulatory initiatives, to improve patient care at the local, regional and national levels.
• Allowing patients to manage their personal health record (PHR) between healthcare systems.

4. Better Decision Making 

Hospitals cannot wait for a problem to turn into a crisis before they intervene; nor miss out on opportunities to improve productivity and performance, and implement best practices.

Optimized EMR analytics support better decision making by delivering timely, accurate, insightful reports that proactively highlight trends, identify issues, and support improvement across all relevant KPIs, and for each stakeholder group.

5. Enables Scaling

As the volume of EMR data grows and expands over time, the organization encounters new challenges in providing strategic data analysis. The sheer volume of data, coupled with the complexity of data interdependencies, can be overwhelming. Optimized EMR analytics address the scalability issues inherent in manipulating large data sets.

The Bottom Line

At Syntrix Consulting Group, we specialize in working with hospitals across the country to optimize their EMR analytics. We ensure their EMR systems deliver on their expectations, and help them measurably, and sometimes dramatically, enhance productivity and performance.

To learn more, contact us today! Or, if you're looking for more information on leveraging your EMR analytics to improve productivity and performance, download our FREE eBook: