Many health system and hospital leaders driven by trends such as value based incentives, frontline burnout, and focus on patient experience have realized the need to shift from a reactive to a more proactive environment where teams can get ahead of key bottlenecks in day-to-day operations. One of the ways leaders have tried to achieve that goal is by turning towards predictive analytics.
What most fail to recognize is that a prediction alone can be counter productive. A prediction is never a single data point but rather a distribution. It is very hard to communicate a probability or a distribution to a busy frontline teammate at the point of care without further increasing their cognitive load.
It would be highly counterproductive to the driver if Google Maps or Waze, instead of a recommendation to turn left or right, advised that there is a 40% chance of traffic on one street and 25% on another. Factoring in those statistics in the moment while driving, along with understanding the length of the road and the speed limit would add a tremendous amount of burden on the driver.
In addition, traditional predictive analytics solutions are often simple rules based algorithms that are static, predetermined and do not adapt automatically to the changing context over time. The analyticsMD machine learning based approach on the other hand, automatically updates its predictions on a continuous basis, so that it can dynamically understand and react to the relevant changes on the ground.
By combining machine learning to predict, its decision analysis to prescribe and prescription gateway to persuade key stakeholders to take action, the analyticsMD software acts like a virtual “air traffic control” constantly monitoring the situation, anticipating problems and creating ‘virtual huddles’ between front line staff to act at the right time. Therefore, by replacing the need to constantly monitor hundreds of metrics unlike most predictive analytics tools, analyticsMD’s platform empowers a proactive data driven culture without significant disruption to day to day workflow.
