Airlines are arguably more operationally complex, asset-intensive, and regulated than hospitals, yet the best performers are doing a better job by far than most hospitals at keeping costs low and make a decent profit while delivering what their customers expect. Southwest Airlines, for example, has figured out how to do well the two operational things that matter most: Keep more planes in the sky more often, and fill each of them up more, and more often, than anyone else. Similarly, winners in other complex, asset-intensive, service-based industries — Amazon, well-run airports, UPS, and FedEx — have figured out how to over-deliver on their promise while staying streamlined and affordable.
Why Hospitals Need Better Data Science
Hospitals today face the same cost and revenue pressure that retail, transportation, and airlines have faced for years. As Southwest, Amazon, FedEx, and UPS have demonstrated, to remain viable, industries that are asset-intensive and service-based must streamline operations and do more with less. Health care providers can’t keep spending their way out of trouble by investing in more and more infrastructure; instead, they must optimize their use of the assets currently in place. To do this, providers need to consistently make excellent operational decisions, as these other industries have. Ultimately, they need to create an operational “air traffic control” for their hospitals — a centralized command-and-control capability that is predictive, learns continually, and uses optimization algorithms and artificial intelligence to deliver prescriptive recommendations throughout the system. Dozens of healthcare organizations are now streamlining operations by using platforms from providers including LeanTaaS, Intelligent InSites, Qgenda, Optum, and IBM Watson Health. What these solutions have in common is the ability to mine and process large quantities of data to deliver recommendations to administrative and clinical end users. Used correctly, analytics tools can lower health care costs, reduce wait times, increase patient access, and unlock capacity with the infrastructure that’s already in place.