Heightened plans for transformative changes in the back half of the year
CHICAGO, August 6, 2024 – Health systems make swift changes to regain footing in 2024 as industry challenges present unique solutions. Executive leaders from Q-Centrix share three key observations for how hospitals and health systems are responding to the market and what we can expect for the rest of the year.
The healthcare industry is making headway after a challenging 2023, and the current landscape poses unique opportunities for growth. One area of focus is clinical data, which can be harnessed to implement improvements and reduce expenses.
“More and more leaders realize that improving clinical data management processes can drive cost savings across the board,” said Raghu Bukkapatnam, Chief Growth Officer at Q-Centrix. “Depending on its size, a health system can spend anywhere from $10 million to more than $50 million on clinical data management activities every year. Assessing what they spend, understanding what kind of return they get from their investments, and identifying inefficiencies are simple ways to improve financial performance.”
To that end, Q-Centrix executives identified three key strategies hospital and health system leaders are exploring to mitigate financial pressures throughout the rest of 2024.
Hospitals are seeking refuge from continued cost pressure with AI solutions, but the safe integration of generative AI is a long-term endeavor, not a quick fix to shrink spending.
Q-Centrix’s 2024 State of the Industry Report notes that 79% of healthcare facilities use or plan to use AI technologies to curate clinical data, whether internally or through a third party—and for nearly half of these respondents, their primary goal for using AI in this way is reducing administrative burden on staff. With administrative tasks costing the U.S. healthcare system $60 billion dollars each year, AI has great potential to save time and lower costs. However, the risk an AI model introduces compared to an individual’s impact is exponential.
Brian Foy, Chief Product Officer at Q-Centrix, anticipates that many leaders within the hospital setting are looking to AI to solve their budgetary concerns but are underestimating its risks.
“The potential that AI presents is huge, but it comes at a cost: substantive risk. Models create model-sized problems; inevitably, someone is going to be in the headlines because LLMs broke something that negatively impacted a large patient population. The only way to avoid the risk is with precision—but precision at scale is extraordinarily complex, and it requires a combination of access, technology, and human intervention. Unless hospitals are willing to take a thoughtful, long-term AI approach that includes all these elements—or partner with an organization that has a proven track record for exploring AI safely—they may need to consider other ways to reduce costs.”
Alternatively, to address rising expenses, hospitals are exploring new growth options in areas traditionally seen as cost centers, such as quality. Leveraging clinical data sets from registries for research offers new opportunities to drive advancements and generate revenue.
Three-quarters of hospital leaders Q-Centrix surveyed said their facility is currently sharing or plans to share de-identified clinical data with other organizations for research purposes. Yet almost two-thirds of clinical trials fail to enroll enough patients for an effective study.
“Hospitals sit on a mountain of data that can be used for research, and leaders are starting to realize how much value that data holds for the communities they serve,” said Victor Wang, Q-Centrix’s Senior Vice President of Data and Research. “Exploring these types of expansions of their clinical data usage has great potential for hospitals: they can contribute to life-saving research, offer patients early access to innovative treatments, and stay competitive. Providing their data for funded research opportunities opens up entirely new revenue streams for hospitals.”
The ability to access structured, flexible, and custom clinical data sets is essential for health system leaders seeking innovative ways to leverage their data. But when most clinical data is unstructured and siloed throughout the health system, centralizing data management is paramount.
Q-Centrix found that nearly eight in 10 hospitals are currently centralizing or planning to centralize clinical data management throughout a region, service line, or facility. This strategy allows healthcare facilities to save costs, drive efficiencies, and gain unparalleled access to their data.
“We’re seeing more leaders explore their clinical data use cases,” explained Bukkapatnam. “We’ve found that any effective strategy begins with an enterprise approach and ends with a clinical data warehouse. When leaders centralize data management processes, they can transform their data from disparate, unstructured information to clean, actionable data sets with endless uses.”
Q-Centrix, the industry’s largest provider of enterprise clinical data management solutions, stated in its 2024 State of the Industry report that 2024 is the year to start seeing healthcare differently. That statement still holds true for the remainder of 2024 as hospitals and health system leaders navigate industry changes and challenges. This shifting landscape presents a unique opportunity to pursue new strategies for growth and innovation.
About Q-Centrix
Q-Centrix sees clinical data differently—as custom data sets with infinite possibilities.
Providing the industry’s first Enterprise Clinical Data Management (eCDM™) approach, Q-Centrix combines technology, the largest and broadest team of clinical data experts, and insights from its more than 1,200 partners to help improve patient outcomes and drive process and performance improvement, strategic growth, and operational efficiency.
Its solutions address a variety of clinical data needs, including quality measurement and improvement, cardiovascular, oncology, trauma, research, and more.
See the full press release on the Cision newswire.
