Over the past two years, COVID-19 has brought about a surge in demand for behavioral health services and other medical services. This surge, along with the need for social distancing, has brought about an increase in virtual services throughout the healthcare industry. Specifically, many practices have turned to the use of telehealth services to help meet the needs of their clients. The result? An influx of data that is reinforcing the need for robust health-data infrastructures in order to excel and thrive during the pandemic and beyond.
Virtual care has become a vital instrument for coping with a rapidly spreading infection like COVID-19. With the large number of patients involved and the face-to-face risk of infecting patients and staff, online consultations and remote patient management can provide valuable relief to the health-care system. Specifically within the behavioral health sector, online therapy and virtual meetings are becoming the new norm. People no longer have to leave the comfort of their own home to see providers, or to attend their weekly therapy session. Even so, with those wishing to return to the office, care metrics, reminder emails, charts and everything in between is held almost exclusively online now. With these shifts and changes, being able to collect, qualify, and analyze data in ways that quickly reveal patterns and hidden insights is more important than ever. More and more practices are requiring robust health-data infrastructures than ever before.
Over the past two decades, and especially in the last two years, many Pinnacle clients have requested assistance in setting up various ways to collect, visualize and evaluate data related to the pandemic. A current Pinnacle client monitors various metrics, including staff wellness regarding infection. We worked together with them to clean, aggregate and introduce various data sources into the Pinnacle Data Warehouse. This collected data provides a fast and efficient way for the agency staff to display the data to stakeholders in visually appealing Power BI dashboards.
Several data sources were utilized, including agency rosters, shared spreadsheets and existing Pinnacle Healthcare OLAP data cubes (pre-compiled data structures). The result is the dashboard above which is updated in near real-time and distributed to users to keep them updated on situations as they emerge. The intended result is to ensure proper levels of staffing to support the agency mission and consistent patient care.
Stakeholders have access to an appealing collection of well-designed visualizations with plentiful data movement and ETL (Data Extract Transform Load) in the background. That data is brought together and presented in a way so that a user can quickly understand important aspects of staff health in an effective way.
As the industry continues to adapt with the ongoing pandemic, it is crucial that practices have a robust data system that works for them. Having data at your fingertips is what your organization deserves. If gaining value from your many data sources is important, please schedule a free consultation with Pinnacle today.