4 Major Benefits of Embedded Analytics for Healthcare Industry
Introduction
The future of healthcare will be shaped by digital innovation and data analytics. Health departments will place a high priority on analytics technologies as they prove to make a difference in the delivery of patient care, the prediction and prevention of disease outbreaks, and the cost of treatment, to name a few. Embedding analytics within the applications healthcare professionals and administrators already use lowers the learning curve dramatically in already fast-paced environments. In this blog post, I am going to give you an overview of embedded analytics, and how it will help you to enhance your healthcare department.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedding analytics is the process of integrating analytical and data visualization capabilities into a software application. By incorporating reports and dashboards in existing software products, embedded analytics assist users in finding the trends in their data that provide actionable insights. Users can discover and minimize their business risks as well as find new opportunities using the information gained from this analysis.
Benefits of embedded analytics in the healthcare industry
Tracking patient records
Embedded healthcare analytics helps healthcare teams to reduce unexpected challenges during emergencies and make the most efficient use of resources by tracking useful KPIs and metrics. Visuals created with the metrics help physicians understand a patient’s story at a glance and help healthcare monitors make better decisions. Analytics allows healthcare providers to offer a more personalized approach to treatment, especially for at-risk patients, using advanced analytics and visualization of patient profiles and health conditions.
Human error deduction
In healthcare, human errors can be fatal. Embedded healthcare analytics can help providers find potential errors and avoid mistakes by making it easier to access and analyze data in real time. For example, healthcare facilities can analyze errors that occur due to appointment handling or scheduling, time allocation for different exam steps, allocation of doctors in a system, record handling, proper equipment maintenance, and much more. Better visuals embedded in applications help to pinpoint these errors, since trends are more understandable in graphs than just written observations stored in files.
Cost reduction
With embedded healthcare analytics, healthcare providers can easily track and understand patients’ overall health. It can decrease costs for patients by highlighting unnecessary hospital spending patterns through tracking all historical expenditures, allowing for cost-saving measures to be taken across the board.
Proper data analysis can break down costs like these hospital expenditures, historical insurance coverage for different procedures and drugs, supplies ordered versus used, and price fluctuations for supplies from different vendors. Visualizations like charts make this information easily accessible so that administrators can make better decisions about pricing services, ordering supplies, etc. They can effectively reduce costs and have more confidence in their budgets.
Improving patient satisfaction
One objective of any healthcare provider is to keep patients satisfied. With embedded healthcare analytics, healthcare providers can improve care experiences by improving critical care response times, especially in emergency situations, service quality, environment cleanliness monitoring, medical equipment availability, health condition monitoring, and much more. By tracking all metrics systematically in one place, a healthcare facility can make progress to satisfying patients’ expectations.
How to embed analytical tools into healthcare domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into healthcare web applications. I am going to give you a walkthrough on embedding dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario where your healthcare facility has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI Embedded and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard.
Prerequisites
Deploy the Bold BI Embedded edition in your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your ASP.NET MVC application, first you need to create one. So, open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
Then, create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard root URL, site identifier, environment, user email, and embed secret.
Root URL: Dashboard server BI URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi, http://dashboard.syncfusion.com/bi.Site Identifier: For Bold BI Enterprise edition, it should be something like “site/site1”. For Bold BI Cloud edition, it should be an empty string.Environment: Bold BI application environment. For cloud BI, you can use “cloud”. For enterprise BI, you should use “enterprise”.User Email: Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the EmbedSecret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button to generate the embed secret. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated, and you can paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Also, reference required script files and CSS files in HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards in your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code mentioned in all these steps from our documentation.
Bold BI’s healthcare solution dashboard examples
Hospital Management Dashboard
Using this Hospital Management dashboard, you can monitor important KPIs such as the average length of stay of patients, readmission rate, and average treatment costs. You can monitor the details related to bed occupancy rate, upcoming appointments per doctor, the number of patients in and out with respect to division, and so on.
Key metrics
Readmission rate: Shows patients who are discharged from the hospital and again admitted within a specific time period. The readmission rate is calculated by dividing the number of readmissions by the total number of admissions.
Bed occupancy rate: Shows the number of beds occupied by patients. It’s calculated by dividing the number of beds effectively occupied by the number of beds available.
Average treatment cost by age group: Average treatment cost is how much a patient pays for total treatment. Here, it shows according to different age categories.
Upcoming appointments: Shows the details of the upcoming appointments: doctor name, specialization, date and time, patient ID, and status.
To learn more about this dashboard, refer to this link.
Patient health monitoring
This Patient Health Summary dashboard helps healthcare professionals monitor a patient’s health information, including the metrics for their heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, blood cholesterol, blood glucose, body temperature, BMI, and more.
Key metrics
Step counter: Shows the percentage of the target number of steps the patient has walked.
Hours of sleep: Shows the percentage of the patient’s target sleeping hours being slept.
Heart rate: Shows the heart rate of the patient ( Wikipedia: the speed of the heartbeat measured by the number of contractions (beats) of the heart per minute (bpm)).
Sleep hours vs. deep sleep hours summary: Shows the comparison of sleep hours and deep sleep hours of individual patients by date for the last 30 days to measure the quality of patients’ sleep.
To learn more about this dashboard, refer to this link.
Patient Experience Analysis
This Patient Experience Analysis dashboard analyzes important KPIs such as patient satisfaction trends during hospital visits.
Key metrics
Patient satisfaction: Shows the percentages of patient satisfaction at different levels: average, excellent, good, and poor.
Average visit length by department: Shows how long patients were in the hospitals.
Average wait time by department: Measures how long patients waited to see their doctors.
Patient count by department: Measures total patient count in each department.
To learn more about this dashboard, refer to this link.
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) analysis
This Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Situation dashboard helps healthcare providers track the health status of each country with metrics such as confirmed cases, recovered cases, deaths by date and country, and total mortality rate by date.
Key metrics
Confirmed cases-top 6 countries: Shows the confirmed case count for the top 6 countries.
Summary by country: Shows a summary of each country with cases confirmed, patients recovered, and deaths.
Confirmed, recovered, and death trends-last 50 days: Shows a comparison of cases confirmed, patients recovered, and the death count by date.
Confirmed cases by country: Shows confirmed cases by country.
To learn more about this dashboard, refer to this link.
Clinical Trials dashboard
This Clinical Trials dashboard provides a review of all trials, summarizing the clinical trial data by intervention type, clinical phase, clinical condition, trial status, location, and more.
Key metrics
Total trials: Shows the total research trials participated in by patients.
Sponsors: Shows the total companies, institutions, and organizations involved in the sponsorship of clinical trial research.
Sources: Shows the total sources that hold the medical records of conducting and managing clinical trials.
Trials by sponsor type: Shows the percentage of sponsorship provided by different kinds of agencies in all clinical trials within a specific time period.
Trial by status: Shows the total research trials in progress within a specific time period.
To know more about this dashboard, refer to this link.
Conclusion
Bold BI Embedded helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, and more, seamlessly. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI Embedded and how it will help the healthcare industry to be more successful. You can create a dashboard as you like with Bold BI Embedded’s 35 widgets and 130 data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, schedule a free 30-minute demo with our experts about creating dashboards and any other features you would like to learn more about. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on September 10, 2021.
