Becker’s Hospital Review reports: “Often times, big data is discussed in terms of the clinical insight it offers physicians and researchers in the realm of population health and behavioral change. Hospitals can leverage big data to provide insight to inform such immediate actions as payer negotiations or identifying personnel productivity.”
“We’ve survived for a lot of years with regards to small data, and now there’s just been an onslaught of accumulation of information, everything from your mobile phone to your car,” T. Scott Law, founder and CEO of revenue-cycle-management services provider Zotec Partners, told Becker’s. “Everything you do is collecting data points that can be impactful for business.”
Becker’s noted that “With data, gut reactions and personal bias have been essentially eliminated from business decisions because the data provide many of the sought-after answers.”
“For example, one radiology practice conducts 300,000 procedures per year, which generates approximately 250,000 claims per year. One claim requires about 350 data elements. That equates to 87,500,000 pieces of data elements each year from just one radiology practice. Four practices with similar case volumes would generate nearly 350 million data elements a year, such as social data, demographic information, social patterns, clinical data and buying patterns, including when patients like to pay their bill.”
Becker’s reported that “Zotec Partners’ platform draws from the troves of data to create personas of individuals and payers to optimize the billing process by determining an individual’s propensity to pay or the propensity for friction. Knowing these tendencies ahead of time allows hospitals to tailor billing interactions and collection techniques to individuals to minimize friction and maximize collections.”
“Based on a person’s characteristics and tendencies, hospitals can decide how to best interact with an individual and ultimately collect money. For example, a patient’s demographics can suggest the likelihood that he will respond to a text message notification about medical bills versus receiving bills in the mail.”