3 Healthcare Data Tools To Share With Association Members

As an association leader, you know the importance of developing and promoting educational content that supports members’ professional goals and interests. After all, a key reason why members join associations is to access continuing education opportunities, specialized information, and industry-specific best practices. So, guiding them toward those resources helps boost member retention and satisfaction.

In the healthcare industry, technology is revolutionizing care delivery and cost by enabling providers and payers to leverage data more effectively. Healthcare associations should educate members about these tools to help them put data into practice and keep up with the industry’s shift toward value-based care.

Let’s take a closer look at the healthcare data tools your association should share with members.

Healthcare Data Platforms

What Are These?

Just as data hygiene is important for managing your association effectively, health professionals must maintain hygienic data at their organizations to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care. That’s where healthcare data platforms come in.

Healthcare data platforms are centralized systems that aggregate and organize critical health data, such as electronic health records (EHRs) and claims data. This tool is the foundation of data-driven healthcare, as it integrates analytics models like predictive analytics and natural language processing to transform data into a usable asset.

The term “healthcare data platform” actually refers to three different tools: data warehouses, data lakes, and the modern data lakehouse. While each type of platform manages data differently, the lakehouse is the most advanced data management solution that enables useful analytics through the following features:

• Daily data updates and syncs

• Security measures and access control

• Web-based integrated tools

• Adaptable data sourcing

• Rapid turnaround and recovery

• Granular data distribution

How to Share This Tool With Members

Whether your members are providers looking to enhance their point-of-care decision-making or analysts hoping to increase their research capabilities, healthcare data platforms are critical for accessing the right data at the right time.

Partner with software vendors and host educational webinars where members can learn more about the software’s capabilities directly from the provider. You could also incorporate networking opportunities into conferences and trade shows where members can mingle with software vendors to learn more about the benefits these platforms can bring.

Risk Adjustment Software

What Is It?

With the recent shift to value-based care contracts, risk adjustment is an increasingly important process for encouraging equitable coverage. Payers must consider all risk factors to design health insurance plans that align payments with actual risk.

Risk adjustment software analyzes patient data to calculate risk scores, which represent the costs associated with a patient’s predicted usage of health services. This software uses integration and analysis to flag any areas where a patient’s risks are not fully accounted for. Then, payers and providers can create workflows according to the identified risk gaps.

How to Share This Tool With Members

To showcase this software’s full functionality, you’ll need to demonstrate the following features to your members:

• Reporting dashboards, which present data in a digestible format

• Patient stratification tools, which categorize patients based on their risk scores

• Patient-provider collaboration, which facilitates communication between both parties

Virtual workshops and training sessions are best positioned to help members grasp these capabilities and apply them to their own workflows. Consider partnering with vendors for virtual demonstrations of the software’s functionalities and Q&A sessions to answer members’ questions.

Healthcare Dashboards

What Are These?

It’s estimated that the healthcare industry generates 30% of the world’s data volume, meaning health professionals across the care continuum work with vast—and continuously growing—quantities of data. While gathering this data into one central repository is a good first step, health professionals need a tool that can make sense of this information and extract meaning from it.

Healthcare dashboards are analytics tools that illustrate key data points and surface relevant insights, allowing users to organize and act on data. These dashboards can cover various aspects of healthcare, including:

• Quality performance: This dashboard compares the operational performance of payers, primary care providers (PCPs), and additional healthcare providers.

• Benchmarking: This dashboard measures an organization’s performance against external, market-based standards to highlight opportunities for improvement.

• Social determinants of health (SDoH): This dashboard tracks the nonmedical factors (i.e., transportation, income levels, etc.) impacting patients’ health so that providers can assess the impacts of these factors and intervene as needed.

How to Share This Tool With Members

To present this tool to members, review healthcare dashboard examples and note the specific metrics they track. This will help you narrow down which dashboards are most applicable to your members and how you’ll explain them.

Hands-on training sessions are critical for this type of software since members will have differing dashboard priorities. For example, some members may need to analyze transitional care management (TCM) data, while others want to visualize the cost per treatment. Consider surveying members about their data needs and planning sessions that focus on relevant topics.

Equipping your members with the right resources requires thorough strategic planning and an actionable plan for giving them access to these tools. If you need help turning these software recommendations into practical applications for your members, consider consulting an association management company. These professionals can help your association get its day-to-day operations in order so that you can focus on big-picture value adds for your members.

For example, Talley helped The American Board of Clinical Social Work (ABCSW) redefine its identity and services so the organization could widen its reach. Now, the association is equipped to meet its members’ diverse needs and boost member retention.