According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of medical and health services managers is expected to grow 28% through 2032. But, employers are looking for candidates with a strong foundation to fill these open roles. Healthcare organizations seek professionals with top leadership, management and business intelligence skills.
If you want to enhance your career and move into a health service manager role, then pursuing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree can help. Graduates who earn an online MBA with a Health Services Administration Concentration from Eastern Washington University (EWU) are equipped with in-demand skills and expertise to strategically improve healthcare operations and outcomes as health services administrators.
What is Business Intelligence?
As organizations continue to look toward data collection and analysis, their leaders can use information strategically to drive business decisions. One critical way healthcare leaders look at data is through the lens of business intelligence.
According to G2, business intelligence in healthcare “focuses on extracting meaningful information from various data sources, including electronic health records, financial systems, operational databases, and external datasets.” Unlike business analytics, which analyzes the relationships in data to determine the likelihood of future outcomes, business intelligence uncovers patterns from historical and present data.
Healthcare professionals can reference this past and current information strategically to replicate what works or drive change for what isn’t working.
How Do Health Services Administrators Use Information Strategically?
Although health services administrator responsibilities differ entirely from physician or nurse responsibilities, their behind-the-scenes work impacts patient care just as much. To make large-scale decisions, these professionals use business intelligence. Below are three real-life examples of how health services administrators use business intelligence in their organization:
- Coordinate staff schedules: Developing work schedules for physicians, nurses and staff is the responsibility of health services administrators. Business intelligence tells you when your facility is busiest, which allows you to increase or decrease employees on specific days and shifts to help mitigate employee stress and create a better work-life balance.
- Financial management: Health services administrators manage facility finances, including monitoring budgets and spending. Business intelligence can track past finances and spending to better allocate funds or keep them the same.
- Ensure quality of patient care: The level of care provided to patients is always top of mind for health services administrators. Business intelligence can help provide enhanced care by tracking patient medical data such as heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels. Storing this information in a centralized place allows for quick decision-making if a patient’s treatment needs collaboration across multiple departments.
If you want to pursue a leadership role in healthcare, then now is the time to leverage business intelligence. Organizations need professionals who understand data and can use it to effectively run a business.
Leverage Business Intelligence in Healthcare at EWU
Using business intelligence in your healthcare organization provides enhanced patient care, easier financial planning, quicker decision-making and optimized operations. EWU’s online MBA with a Health Services Administration Concentration program provides the foundational knowledge of business intelligence needed to help your organization thrive.
This program offers a Business Intelligence in Health Systems course that examines how information acts as a resource supporting a health system’s operations and requirements, such as “regulatory, legal, risk and environmental requirements.” Students also review how business intelligence is implemented in current health systems implementation and how this affects management and finance decisions.
Learn more about EWU’s online Master of Business Administration with a Health Services Administration Concentration program.
