For hospitals and risk-bearing entities across healthcare, the importance and power of accurate contact data is an everyday reality. Operating in a patient-centric industry means reliable data is necessary to seamlessly operate, grow, and provide a positive patient experience. As the amount of data across healthcare grows, coupled with the rise of consumerism, knowing how to accommodate patients in a digital-first landscape, including the collection, maintenance, and use of contact data, becomes critical.
What does this mean for the healthcare industry? The importance of healthcare data protection combined with the need to maintain accuracy as patient data grows means data cleansing and management have become vital for everyday operations. Below, we’ll outline what effective data management may look like in your organization while defining the steps to help you get started.
What do data cleansing and data management mean for healthcare?
On a surface level, healthcare industry leaders inevitably find that trustworthy data is essential for operational efficiency and improved patient experiences. But on a more granular level, what exactly does this mean? How will putting in place data quality practices impact your operations and what does industry best practice look like?
As the name denotes, data cleansing refers to the process of ensuring accurate, up-to-date data in your database. This means incorrect, duplicate, or incomplete data entries are corrected by trusted software in real-time or on the back end, depending on your use-case. Since the amount of data being collected across healthcare is greater than most other industries, cleansing ensures this information continues to be accurate despite changes that can occur in addresses, emails, and other key contact information.
Data cleansing solutions act as a preventative measure against inaccurate data by ensuring accurate data collection at the point of entry. Safeguard against typos from representatives or patients themselves with solutions such as:
With trustworthy data quality solutions at the foundation of your operations, you can offer the best possible patient support and service by improving the speed and accuracy of patient data collection, while continuing to safeguard sensitive information.
The importance of data quality across healthcare
The data quality best practices that you implement play a key role in providing a reliable patient experience so that they receive the best possible care. Here are the top 3 benefits that accurate data can help you achieve:
1. Maintain accuracy—especially during unexpected events
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry saw tremendous growth in the need for digital-first interactions. Due to safety concerns, fewer individuals are engaging in person, meaning contact data is more important than ever to get in touch with patients via email, text, or call. What’s more, hospitals provided care for an unprecedented amount of patients—strengthening the need for speedy collection of data to support continued care management through patient and member communication.
More recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has stated they will lift the Covid-19 continuous enrollment in 2022. To maintain coverage for eligible patients and ensure member rosters have accurate information, updating contact data will be critical.
2. Enhance patient billing processes
It’s no secret that a top priority across the healthcare industry is to provide quality and reliable care to patients. What’s more, as healthcare’s revenue cycle is patient-dependent, it’s critical to support patients with the help they need while effectively billing both the patients and payers. However incorrect data used within the billing process can create roadblocks, making it difficult to bill patients and connect with payers.
To make the billing process seamless, data validation helps to ensure that you have accurate and up-to-date email, address, and phone data to contact patients through the best channel possible Additionally, data quality solutions can help billing departments to:
- Append additional contact information to create a more comprehensive patient contact record
- Ensure contact data accuracy despite the growing number of individuals entered across systems
- Keep contact data up to date, despite changes in names and addresses.
3. Reduce unnecessary costs
According to a new AHA report1, hospitals have experienced an increase in costs across the board between 2019 and 2021, with the average supply cost rising 21% per patient. This means that maximizing the ROI on any investment in this industry is crucial in lowering overhead and providing patients with top-tier care. Fortunately, data validation solutions and data management software helps improve and maintain the reliability of contact data, which is important to reducing unnecessary costs associated with poor quality data.
By implementing data quality solutions, you remove the guesswork around how, when, and through what channel is best to reach individuals, saving time and money you can invest back into optimizing patient care.
Experian-powered solutions for healthcare providers
Our top priority is giving you the tools you need to provide a positive and effective patient experience—across all stages of the healthcare journey. And with 30 years of expertise in data quality, we can provide the best guidance and solutions you need to do just that.
1 https://www.aha.org/news/news/2022-04-25-aha-report-hospitals-battle-cost-surge-along-covid-19-and-medicare-payment
