Analytics across the ecosystem

Analytics is a key enabler for life sciences and healthcare organizations to create better outcomes for patients, customers and other stakeholders across the entire healthcare ecosystem. While almost two-thirds of organizations across the healthcare ecosystem have analytics strategies in place, our research shows that only a fifth are driving analytics adoption across the enterprise. The key barriers are a lack of data management capabilities and skilled analysts, as well as poor organizational change management. To develop and translate insights into actions that enhance outcomes, organizations will need to collaborate across an expanding ecosystem.

The healthcare ecosystem is the convergence of otherwise separate entities, such as life sciences organizations, providers and payers, as well as social and government agencies. This convergence, along with enhanced connectivity and mobility, has resulted in a tremendous surge in healthcare-related data that can help create insights and inform actions to:

• Improve patient outcomes
• Reduce costs for chronic care
• Lower insurance premiums
• Quickly bring new and better drugs, diagnostics, devices and
therapies to the market
• Enhance customer engagement
• Reduce fraud
• Improve return on investment.

But to optimize the impact these insights and actions can have, information must be shared across the entire ecosystem. Unfortunately, most organizations are not yet equipped to share information within their own walls, let alone across the entire ecosystem.

Consider, for example, that every day, people around the world die unnecessarily because of inefficiencies, uncoordinated care delivery and lack of integrated information across the global healthcare system. In the United States alone, 96 people per 100,000 die annually from conditions considered responsive to healthcare. U.S. hospitals, as well as those in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom, report high levels of preventable errors for hospitalized patients, as high as 45.8 percent in some cases. Of these errors, many – up to 51.2 percent in some countries – are considered preventable with the right information and resources in place.