What is Tableau?
Tableau is the fastest-growing platform for visual analytics on the market. It allows users to simplify raw data into a format that’s easy to access and understand by those working at any level of an organization. Even non-technical Tableau users can create customized dashboards and worksheets with the help of this versatile tool. It’s relied on by teachers, students, Data Scientists, Analysts, executives, and business owners for their end-to-end analytics needs. This is why Tableau is considered to be the leading analytics platform for business intelligence.
This article will explore the field of healthcare analytics and how Tableau is being used by various healthcare organizations to help understand and manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Brief Overview of Healthcare Analytics
An important part of the healthcare industry is the collection of data. Data provides healthcare organizations, practitioners, and workers with important insights into ways to offer more effective patient care, as well as better day-to-day operations. It’s a means of reviewing historical information, noticing current trends, and tracking outcomes.
Healthcare analytics entails analyzing recent as well as historic health-related data to anticipate trends, provide better patient care and outreach options, and to help mitigate the spread and effects of diseases. Healthcare analytics is a broad field that seeks to provide insights into both macro-level and micro-level health issues. Those who work in this field have the power to affect positive change for healthcare providers and patients alike; the data they collect and present visually using Tableau is a powerful tool for better business management, improving patient care quality, and better diagnosis and treatment options.
Why is Healthcare Analytics Important?
The following are some of the most popular applications of healthcare analytics, as well as the benefits they provide stakeholders:
- Helping with staffing concerns: One of the main concerns a medical facility faces pertains to making sure it is adequately staffed. If a hospital is understaffed, patients receive less care; if it is overstaffed, the hospital may accrue needless expenses. When applied to staffing considerations, healthcare analytics draws from prior months’ and years’ admission records to pinpoint patterns and offer predictions on what hospital admission may look like in a week or so. This allows hospitals to schedule additional staff to compensate for larger patient volumes and also cuts down on the wait time for patients.
- Advancing research: Healthcare analytics is helping to advance clinical research, which can lead to better clinical guidelines, as well as registry-based clinical trials.
- Identifying high-risk patients: Rather than just treating a patient’s current symptoms, healthcare analytics allows practitioners to spot patients who are at a higher risk of chronic illness, which is an effective preventive means, as well as a cost-saver for all parties, including the patient, insurance provider, and practitioner.
- Reducing healthcare costs: As fee-for-healthcare is being replaced with patient-centric models, the use of predictive and preventive measures is growing in importance. Predictive and prescriptive analytics provide healthcare practitioners with comprehensive models for mitigating patient risk as well as reducing the cost of treatment. The field of health data analytics is also a valuable tool for preventing equipment malfunctions and cutting down on appointment no-shows.
- Incorporating predictive modeling: When applied to the healthcare setting, predictive analytics informs healthcare professionals of the possible risks in a situation. For example, studying behavioral data helps with predicting the possible risk of chronic illness as well as treatment outcomes. Predictive modeling also has large-scale applications. It’s used to manage the health of whole populations in terms of predicting outbreaks and offering insights about what can be done to prevent future incidence.
- Evaluating healthcare practitioners: When patients write reviews about visiting a doctor, the data from these reviews are collected and analyzed to indicate which areas can be improved to offer a better patient experience.
- Noticing anomalies in scans: Machine learning algorithms allow Healthcare Analysts to quickly analyze data. Since these algorithms can learn from data they have already received, when they are applied to situations such as finding differences between MRI scans, they can notice anomalies over a thousand times quicker than a human would be able to.
- Improving e-recordkeeping: Most of the hospitals in the US keep electronic health records of all their patients. These detailed records contain even minute details about a patient’s health, demographic information, and family history of illness. The main benefits of these files are that they can be stored for years without creating a loss of data, and they can be accessed immediately by various hospitals or providers without the need for one facility to send information to another.
- Providing insights about hospitalized patients: When a patient must be hospitalized, healthcare analytics can be applied to anticipate the risks of infection, as well as readmission.
Using Tableau for Healthcare Analytics During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In order for an organization to provide the most up-to-date, cutting-edge healthcare, it’s important to have access to the best data, as well as the tools to gain the most insights from it. The Tableau platform makes the process of visual analytics easier for users, which helps all healthcare stakeholders, from clinicians to administrators to patients, reap the maximum benefits. Tableau plays an integral role in helping organizations make informed decisions based on visual analytics. As this industry continues to evolve to tackle new challenges, Tableau remains committed to helping organizations find helpful, data-based solutions.
The following are some of the ways that the Tableau platform has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide hospitals and organizations with better resources for patient care:
- Abbott Laboratories, one of the largest healthcare and medical device companies in the world, has been distributing millions of COVID-19 tests each month. They have also been looking into collecting more diagnostic testing data to offer better testing options. This has led Abbott to use Tableau to explore data questions pertaining to what is required for a COVID-19 test result to be included in a dataset, as well as which systems are in charge of running the test and generating the result. This is why this company has devoted efforts to identifying KPIs pertaining to patient recruitment, test ordering, sample labeling and sorting, and transporting the sample to the lab.
- Tableau can provide a snapshot of how vulnerable healthcare systems are in rural communities to COVID-19 outbreaks, especially those that rely on public hospitals.
- With the help of Tableau’s extensive data visualization options, current healthcare data trackers can be used to depict how various organizations visualize the spread of COVID-19. Dashboards can be created to indicate which states are current Coronavirus hotspots, how COVID testing compares from state to state, which metrics are essential to consider when reopening the US., and which countries have flattened the COVID-19 curve.
- UChicago Medicine, a premier academic medical center, worked to quickly create new dashboards during the COVID-19 pandemic to make timely data-driven decisions. In order to ensure that the most helpful COVID-19 reporting was being leveraged, this organization used Tableau to implement the following:
- COVID-19 Workflow Timing: This was designed to present an overview of the timelines from when a patient was screened for infection until they have a confirmed or cleared test result. This information helps the hospital ensure that patients who may have been infected are not exposed to others.
- COVID-19 Real-Time Status: UChicago Medicine uses this to keep track of the statuses of confirmed and suspected COVID-19 patients in the hospital. It is updated each minute to reflect testing updates.
- COVID-19 Patient Outcomes: This tool offers an overview of how many patients were admitted or discharged each day, as well as how long they stayed, how many were admitted to the ICU, and how many deaths occur each week. This data can also be filtered by demographic or operational parameters to spot variations in patient outcomes.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry must continue to evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of the current health landscape in the U.S. and beyond. As new technologies become more widely available such as machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, the field of healthcare analytics is expected to continue to transform the healthcare industry.
Start Learning Data Analytics & Tableau with Hands-On Classes
Are you interested in learning more about the field of data analytics? If so, Noble Desktop’s data analytics classes are a great starting point. Courses are currently available in topics such as Excel, Python, and data analytics, among others skills necessary for analyzing data. In addition, more than 130 live online data analytics courses are also available from top providers. Courses range from three hours to six months and cost from $229 to $60,229.
For those who want to learn how to create stunning and engaging data visualizations, maps, charts, and graphs, Noble Desktop’s Tableau classes provide a great option. Small group classes are available in-person in NYC, as well as in the live online format. These Tableau-focused courses teach students skills like how to spot the most optimal datasets to connect to, as well as how to analyze, filter, structure, and visually represent data.
Those who are interested in finding nearby Tableau classes can use Noble’s Tableau Classes Near Me tool. This handy tool provides an easy way to locate and browse more than three dozen of the best Tableau classes currently offered in the in-person and live online formats so that all interested learners can find the course that works best for them.