Leveraging health data insights to pinpoint opportunities for growth

Editor's Note: This is the second of a three-part series offering insights into the fundamentals that drive growth for healthcare organizations.

Before turning healthcare data into insights, it’s necessary to eliminate data silos. These silos exist when sets of data are confined to a few departments in the organization and/or cannot be combined in meaningful ways. That’s a waste, because it creates a fragmented data environment where it’s almost impossible to point your health system’s overall strategy in the right direction, let alone reach a consensus on that strategy.

Break down silos. Unlock smarter strategy.

One of the most effective ways to align your big-picture goals is by using the right technology. A centralized data platform bringing all your information together — so you can turn complex data into clear, actionable insights.

This kind of business intelligence tool pulls in data from across your organization: consumer behavior, patient demographics, provider details, and clinical encounters. When you layer in advanced analytics, it helps connect the dots across these sources — revealing the trends and opportunities that matter most.

Once your data is working together, not in silos, you can spot patterns faster and move from questions to strategies in a matter of hours — not months. Let’s explore a few ways healthcare leaders are using these insights to accelerate growth.

Start with the right questions. Then let data guide the next move.

To uncover meaningful growth opportunities, begin by asking a high-level question that ties directly to your organization’s business goals. For example:
“How can we grow market share by 2%?”
“What will reduce patient attrition by 5%?”

These kinds of questions help define your target audience and focus your efforts on the opportunities that will drive the most impact. With a clear view of your market and consumer behavior, you can identify the activities most likely to move the needle — and guide your best next action.

Since location plays a key role in healthcare decision-making, many organizations evaluate opportunities through a geographic lens. Begin by selecting a predefined service area, either an organizational standard or previously saved ZIP codes or counties. You can also create a custom geography based on the needs of your specific analysis. Likewise, choose from  standard service line definitions, draw from previously saved configurations, or create new ones customized down to the clinical code level.

For healthcare marketers, this helps pinpoint consumers in a specific geographical area who are most likely to need your health system’s services. It also provides insight into current market activity and referring physician loyalty. For service line leaders, it highlights  providers with the most potential to drive referrals, based on both historical patterns and the volume of consumers likely to need the service.

Use guided discovery pathways. Zero in on high-value opportunities.

Once you've identified promising geographic regions for a specific service line, business insights can reveal where the greatest opportunities lie. At this stage, health systems gain a clearer view of which consumers and physicians to prioritize for outreach. By leveraging robust market data, you can uncover opportunities on both fronts— and craft hyper-targeted messaging that delivers stronger results with greater efficiency.

There are three key directions to examine when evaluating discovery pathways. Each offers a unique lens into the market and, when layered together, provides a comprehensive, multidimensional view to guide your next strategic move.

1. MARKET CONSUMER SEGMENTATION

This discovery pathway allows you to compare people with a high propensity for a chosen condition against everyone else in the market. Through market consumer segmentation, you get more granular demographic information, allowing you to identify which forms of marketing the target segment will be most receptive to. Overall, this provides a clear profile of people and households, enabling marketers to customize their strategy and create unique, personalized messages.

2. MARKET ACTIVITY ANALYSIS

This pathway summarizes current activity in a market, such as where people are being treated for certain conditions. A market activity analysis provides hotspots of activity down to the ZIP code level, allowing users to leverage information around factors like seasonality. For example, you can track how many procedures are performed each month over the course of a year — whether at the service line level, within a specific subservice line, or down to individual procedure codes.

3. REFERRAL ANALYSIS

Referral analysis helps your health system identify the most active physicians within a specific service line or procedure — those best positioned to support and influence your overall growth strategy. This is especially useful when you want to better understand the referral patterns of physicians by classifying them as “loyalists” or “splitters.” Loyal physicians rarely or never refer outside of your health system, and splitters more frequently send patients to out-of-network providers. 

The definition of what makes a physician “loyal” or a “splitter” can be configured as well. For example, your organization may consider a splitter to be someone that refers out-of-network  20% of the time, 40% of the time, or a different percentage entirely.

By exploring these unique discovery pathways and layering multiple perspectives, you can evaluate targets from different angles and make data-driven decisions. This approach provides your health system with a comprehensive, targeted list of physicians and patients, allowing you to allocate resources more effectively.

Final thought (for now)

By employing a robust business intelligence tool, health systems can quickly uncover key insights about their patients and how they interact with physicians. What once took months to analyze can now be done in just a few hours — leading to faster wins, improved financial performance, and smarter strategies that align with your long-term goals.

Ready to start from the beginning? The first blog in this series outlines tactics and insights to improve physician in-network utilization. And, if you have questions about anything you read here, let's talk.