The healthcare industry wastes billions of dollars annually, with estimates ranging from $600 billion to almost $2 trillion or 53% of total expenditure. In today’s interconnected environment, automated data analysis is a powerful asset in the bid to reduce health plan costs, optimize medication adherence, and improve patient care.
This technology offers significant benefits of automation in healthcare by enabling pharmaceutical professionals to save time and money, increase productivity, and enhance outcomes. It is, essentially, the future of healthcare. But what is healthcare analytics automation, and how does it further the goals of pharmacy benefits management (PBM) practitioners?
Using Analytics Automation in PBM
Healthcare analytics automation uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to monitor and analyze large data sets autonomously. The software provides PBM professionals with digital tools to automate the monotonous, labor-intensive, and intricate processes involved in collecting and analyzing pharmaceutical Big Data. Examples of analytics automation include recognizing patterns, identifying trends, and surfacing relevant insights without human intervention.
Here’s how analytics automation is used today, and the top six benefits it brings to the PBM table.
Benefit #1: Saves Time and Money
A vast number of pharmacy professionals still depend heavily on costly, labor-intensive manual processes for aggregating and analyzing data. The result is that analyses take too long and allow room for human error, both of which cost companies significantly. By replacing manual processes with computerized technology, organizations can save noteworthy amounts of time.
PBMs can conduct research faster and collate the data quicker. Automation and AI can analyze the data to produce real-time insights and alerts and deliver these to providers to aid their understanding of plan cost drivers as well as patient problems and concerns. These insights help professionals to avoid unnecessary cost and inappropriate utilization, while other benefits of automation in healthcare include:
- minimizing patient disruption,
- speeding up disease management, and
- allowing providers to take meaningful action more rapidly.
The savings in time and resources combined with lower operational and client costs result in higher plan profit margins. This optimizes companies’ profitability, allowing for increased client retention and business expansion.
Benefit #2: Improves Patient Care and Confidence
Automated analytics in healthcare gives healthcare professionals and plan sponsors up-to-date information on the latest drugs available and their effectiveness, drawn from real-time data. This data enables providers to reach earlier diagnoses, spend more time focused on implementing steps for preventative care, and reduces the risk of human error that characterizes mundane statistical collection and analysis.
The improved access to insights also offers PBMs new ways to use data, such as comparing current numbers against historical statistics, producing customized reports, and making recommendations for action based on accurate predictions. These opportunities improve the relationship between patient and provider and boost patient confidence in their healthcare practitioners.
As health plans brace for the coming spike in demand for specialty drugs, it’s even more crucial for providers to have rapid access to data for prescribing these drugs. This enables the PBMs to maximize the benefits of automation in healthcare.
Benefit #3: Applies Insights Faster
Analytics automation facilitates the mining of complex information contained in data and uncovers important trends that can impact a PBM’s analytics strategy or the trajectory of drug purchases. AI can recognize patterns in patients’ diagnoses and map these against drug usage to identify non-adherence, complications, and confounding factors. These tools provide PBMs with a bird’s eye view of their patient utilization universe and deliver multiple benefits of analytics automation.
By providing real-time data to bolster medical evidence, analytics automation delivers insights gleaned from data relating to patients’ medical history and medication usage. AI and real-world evidence empower PBMs to uncover and implement significant client and patient insights while these are still relevant.
Benefit #4: Predicts Outcomes Accurately
The ability to predict treatment outcomes is a vital factor in value-based management. Early detection and treatment allow practitioners to offer preventative care, deliver faster diagnoses, accurately predict patient outcomes, and save more lives. Analytics automation means companies can get immediate insight into patients’ unique population profiles and real-time changes in drug utilization.
Automation technology sorts and analyzes information, drawing from real-time data to provide reports on the effectiveness of treatments. Analysis reveals patterns such as patient adherence, drug complications, and adverse events. This allows providers to take the latest treatment results into consideration, increasing the benefits of automation in healthcare.
Patients’ confidence in their healthcare team improves because analytics automation gives them more time face-to-face with their provider and the most up-to-date diagnostic information.
Benefit #5: Benefits Business and Improves Productivity
Without automation, the current tidal wave of big data swamping healthcare businesses can cause massive losses in time and productivity. PBMs can spend many hours analyzing the hundreds of reports needed to keep their clients’ performance on track. Such activities increase costs for PBMs, their clients, and the entire healthcare market, while reliance on the outdated data produced manually can lower client retention numbers.
Technology cuts out laborious manual reviews. The system analyzes both structured and unstructured data and provides solutions, saving valuable time for those managing pharmacy benefits. PBMs can establish a sustainable supply chain from the manufacturer to the supplier and on to the patient, while expanding the business and creating new jobs.
As organizations grow, automation delivers smoother distribution, better price management, and higher profit margins. Additionally, business improvement opportunities arise when organizations have time to extend their market reach, without the burden of collecting and analyzing big data. These factors demonstrate why analytics automation is beneficial to providing quality healthcare services.
When companies integrate automation, business processes and productivity improve. This directly impacts profitability and company reputation and delivers additional benefits of automation in healthcare.
Benefit #6: Increases Employee Retention
Increasing employee retention is critical for pharmacy benefit management companies to support efficient HR practices. A 2020 survey showed high levels of work overload (43%) and burnout (49%) among healthcare workers. With almost one in five healthcare workers currently quitting, reducing burnout and improving job satisfaction have become priorities.
Employees enjoy greater job satisfaction by not having to waste time performing repetitive tasks. HR costs decrease when providers don’t need to train new personnel constantly. Longer employee terms also mean increased loyalty, a more skilled workforce, fewer transitions, and employment gaps. These elements contribute to a stronger company culture, deeper connections among the team, improved patient relationships, and, ultimately, a better public reputation, demonstrating the benefits of automation in healthcare.
The Bottom Line
PBMs, Payers, Consultants, and TPAs can quickly turn raw data into reliable insights that drive their business forward with data analytics automation. Analytics automation offers multiple high-value use cases, including customer engagement, predictive analytics, and product optimization. AI’s potential contribution to the global economy is estimated to reach $15.7 trillion by 2030. This shows that AI-enabled business process automation is essential for the healthcare sector of the future.
Xevant has the answers for using analytics automation in the PBM analytics space, now and in the future, and we continue to develop cutting-edge technology for potential cost-saving benefits. Contact us to schedule a demo today and learn how your business practices can be automated using our intelligent analytics platform.