Improving healthcare with analytics

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Av Heléne Spjuth, Subject Matter Expert on Healthcare i SAS Institute.

- In international circles, the Swedish healthcare system is often held up as a successful example of universal care. Today, continued healthcare reforms in Sweden focus on giving patients full authority to choose healthcare providers. Referred to as free choice reforms, goals for these programs include improving access to care and providing better services for the amount of money spent.

To succeed, the reforms will require new analytic systems for a number of stakeholders, including providers, politicians and officials, healthcare and social service payers, and patients. Each of these parties will benefit from monitoring tools for informed decision making.

The free choice reporting need 
The free choice changes will require county councils and purchasing offices to forecast healthcare needs, visualize the supply capabilities, compare outcomes at multiple care units and simulate the outcome on new payment models.

Healthcare providers need tools for benchmarking and for visualizing where to establish new centers to meet unfulfilled healthcare needs.

Politicians need reporting solutions to review the overall effects of reform, such as patient satisfaction, financial effects, patient pathways throughout the system and quality improvement and access to care.

Ultimately, the success of a free choice program hinges on the patient's ability to make informed choices about their healthcare providers.

The free choice analytics solution 
SAS is currently partnering with Fujitsu and Infotrek to offer a new healthcare analytics system for simulation, prediction, evaluation, analysis and ranking (SPEAR). The project is designed to analyze and monitor data for the introduction of a free choice model in various regions, counties or municipalities.

SPEAR is a fully hosted solution that comes with data integration routines, data models and a number of finished reports and key figures. The solution's four main modules include two that are available now:

• Unit comparisons publish quality indicators to the citizens so they can make informed choices about service providers. This module is also used for internal monitoring of services by key figures that focus on the essential service content so that planners, buyers, production units and politicians can follow the profits.
• Simulation provides a unique solution to simulate, visualize and communicate the different payment systems' long-term effects on the total budget either per unit or region.

Two more modules are in development:

• Need analysis helps regions, counties and municipalities with long-term planning activities by collecting data and forecasting future healthcare needs of the population using historical consumption studies in the age groups.
• Asset maps monitor the existing range of providers via a mapping tool that displays the supply of care and the analysis of patient flow moving from residence to place of supply.
  

The benefits of SPEAR
Currently, public administrators do not have software to model needs analysis, simulate payment models or monitor publicly funded services such as health and welfare. SPEAR allows for forecasting, monitoring and analysis for better governance, with benefits that include:

• Greater dissemination of information to all stakeholders about the service provider's performance.
• User access to default settings through a role-based login.
• Ability to simulate the effects of different management models without expensive consulting.
• Simplified routine and standard reporting so contract administrators, investigators, analysts and controllers can add more time on actual analysis and investigations.
• Ability to plan healthcare based on projected needs instead of historical production.

Without analytics and reporting, the free choice reforms run the risk of defeating policy aims and causing further gaps between social groups in their access and use of healthcare services. Analytics can help ensure the best healthcare possible for the entire population by helping to allocate resources based on need and empowering citizens with information.

More healthcare advancements in Sweden 
In addition to the free choice reforms, healthcare advocates in Sweden are also focusing on e-health systems, patient safety and clinical treatment support.

Sweden's e-health movement focuses on using information and communication technologies to achieve improvements for patients, health professionals and decision makers. Patients use scientific tools for tracking and measuring their everyday activities and overall lifestyle and work with healthcare providers to report progress and work toward improving their quality of life. Sweden and other countries have found that e-health services not only analyze the best treatment options but also register exact improvements in patients' health.

SAS® Analytics can improve these systems with sophisticated statistical methods and computerized decision support. Accurate analysis can help with error and incident analysis, self evaluation and predictive modeling for clinical treatment. SAS is also involved with regional hospitals in Sweden working to improve patient safety and clinical treatment support for e-health and on-site care. Physicians and nurses use SAS predictive models to support knowledgebased decisions on best praxis with regards to guidelines and a with reference to a database of most effective drug combinations for individual patient needs, depending on history, demographics and biological markers. 

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