Home Care Heroes Blog

Home Care Software Geek Explains "Big Data"

Posts by Home Care Software Geek in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Care Transitions or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening with bigger companies like MicrosoftGoogle and Apple.

The technology industry continuously evolves and there's always a new thing that is all the rage.  Presently the new thing is "Big Data."  The Oxford English Dictionary defines big data as "data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges."

The following slide from IBM puts big data in context by describing the volume of data that is being generated through normal technology-enabled communications (such as that 2.9 email messages are sent per second).

Big_Data_Stats_from_IBM_Ankota_Homecare_Blog

How Does Big Data Affect Me and My Home Care Business?

Rather than explaining to you how big data works and the technologies that are emerging to deal with big data, allow me instead to focus on how big data will affect home care:

  1. Through big data analysis, it will be possible to determine the efficacy of various disease treatments as compared with the circumstances under which they are used.  This will enable better care to be provided at lower cost.

  2. Ultimately every person's DNA will be sequenced allowing individualized treatment for health conditions.

  3. Statistical information will become available for care providers enabling referral sources to choose the best provider and lowest cost.

  4. Competitors will emerge who put technology first (like Honor and CareZapp)

Big Next Steps:

Most readers of this blog are smaller companies who are not positioned to be the innovators in Big Data.  That's ok - you weren't innovators in the Cloud either but you've benefited from it.  The key is for you to start thinking about what big data will enable in home care and start adjusting now.  Here are a few steps you should be thinking about:

  • Use top quality home care software that does more than timekeeping.  Choose software that connects you to electronic referrals and electronic health records and enables new business models like care transitions.

  • Start gathering statistics on key home care metrics like hospitalizations (showing that you avoid them), readmission prevention, fall prevention and more.  These will be the differentiators in the future.

If your home care software is nothing more than a time keeping system and you want to differentiate with services like care transitions, please give Ankota a look.  We'd love to help you.

To learn more about the opportunity to improve care and increase revenue via Care Transitions, Ankota offers a free white paper, Why Care Transitions Is The Next Big Thing for the Home Care Industry that can offer you more insight on this topic.  Just click the link or the picture below to download.

If you're interested in scheduling an online demo of our home care or care transitions software solutions, just click this button:

Tell us how we can help you!

Ankota_Why_Care_Transitions_is_the_Next_Big_Thing_In_Homecare

Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Readmission avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.

 

 

 

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