How Organizations Are Staying Competitive With Business Intelligence Tools

Whether we realize it or not, huge volumes of data are being collected about us every day. From where we commonly eat to the last time we went to the doctor’s office, our lives are recorded and analyzed by complex algorithms. Advertisers and health care organizations rely on real-time data to improve their services and achieve customer or patient satisfaction. Companies that don’t invest in business intelligence tools will have a difficult time keeping up with their competitors.

 

To learn more, check out the infographic below created by the Ohio University Online Master of Business Analytics program.

 

 

How business intelligence tools are helping organizations operate with greater efficiency

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Business Intelligence Tools in Advertising

Many free and open-source tools and platforms are available to businesses of all sizes, offering many benefits and opportunities for growth.

Statistics of Data Generation

Studies indicate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are collected daily. This data is generated every minute from 73,249 online transactions, 3,877,140 Google searches, 4,333,560 YouTube video views, and 97,222 hours of streamed Netflix content. It’s also culled from $7,610,350 worth of merchandise left in abandoned online shopping carts.

 

This data is collected by advertisers so they can glean useful information on a consumer’s online behavior, interests, and location. There are specific benefits of this data for businesses that advertise online. For instance, it can help these businesses grow by allowing them to fine-tune their SEO strategies, target the right customers, and ultimately drive these prospective customers to their website.

Platforms That Collect and Analyze Data for Advertising

There are several data collection platforms that advertisers use to gather key consumer information. Using Google Analytics, for instance, can allow businesses to collect data about users visiting their websites. The platform can also generate reports pertaining to real-time data, audience, lifetime value of users gathered via different means, and behaviors of specific users. Google Ads, meanwhile, allows businesses to run ad campaigns across various platforms like YouTube and Google Search. Data can then be used to help advertisers create targeted campaigns.

 

Facebook is also part of the data collection game with their Facebook Ads Manager platform. This platform enables the social media platform to collect data about users’ interests, which is then used to help advertisers create targeted campaigns. Additionally, business advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network can use Ads Manager to customize metrics, compare performance across specific date ranges, and view data in charts.

Business Intelligence Tools in Health Care

Health care organizations are especially reliant on data to drive improvements in processes that impact patient outcomes. Many platforms and tools are increasing organizations’ ability to act on real-time data and make informed decisions.

Statistics of Data in Health Care

Near the end of 2016, more than 60% of office-based physicians used certified health IT. Additionally, up to 30% of the world’s stored data is generated by the health care industry. Every year, one patient’s imaging and electronic medical record (EMR) data constitute 80 megabytes.

Data Collected in Health Care

The data that’s gathered for health care reasons has several uses. One of these uses connects to electronic health records (EHRs), which tracks information pertaining to allergies, medications, medical history, and lab results. Another use concerns administrative data materials including claims, location of service, and amount billed and reimbursed. A third use is for patient survey data, which can yield information about patient care and perceptions of care quality. It can also gather anecdotal information regarding personal experiences with health plans, hospitals, and physicians.

 

There are numerous benefits of data for health care organizations. Among these are lower administrative costs, supported clinical decision-making, and improved patient outcomes.

Platforms That Collect and Analyze Data in Health Care

One of the data collection platforms used in health care includes Cloud Healthcare API, which allows hospitals to connect their care systems with Google Cloud-built apps like BigQuery and Cloud Dataflow. The platform’s features include control over data storage, having an ability to track actions affecting data, and build-in security.

 

Another platform, IBM Explorys, allows health care organizations to access a suite of data analytics solutions for ambulatory care, inpatient services, and acute care. Its key features include an improved understanding of disease epidemiology and history and the capacity to identify patient profiles that could benefit from a specific treatment.

 

A third platform, Analytics By Microstrategy, is a self-service analytics tool that can connect teams across health care organization’s various departments. It can let teams track supply chain management, analyze operations, and gain insight into revenue cycles.

How Organizations Choose Business Intelligence Tools

Organizations’ services, products, and processes change and evolve to adapt to patient, customer, and market demands. To help employees keep up with workplace requirements, an organization’s leaders need to provide them with useful, easy-to-understand, and capable business intelligence tools.

Steps to Choosing the Right Tools

The first step to using a tool that works well for an organization is to conduct an internal assessment, specifically to identify current needs, evaluate the benefits of current systems, and identify what needs to be updated or replaced. Next, it’s important to set certain high-priority goals like improving diabetes and reducing discharge times. Thirdly, organizations should build a team to integrate data with technology, being sure to give stakeholders from each department a voice and role. Finally, a vendor and product should be selected, but only after interviewing multiple vendors to weed out ones that may have hidden fees, personalization options, or scalability limitations.

Conclusion

Every organization needs a team dedicated to researching and investing in business intelligence tools. The benefits of data, like creating a more personalized customer or patient experience and boosting revenue, can be realized only if the right tools are in place.

 

This article was originally published on Ohio University