Building a data-driven private healthcare practice

Why tracking business data is essential for growing your private healthcare business

Just as patient data is key to delivering successful healthcare treatment, tracking key business analytics is essential to measuring and improving the health of your business. 

With healthcare becoming increasingly digital, there is even greater access to data and analytics tools than ever. In this new ‘Building a data-driven business’ series we will uncover how to use practice data and business analytics to build a strong and thriving private healthcare business.

What does it mean to be ‘data-driven’?

Becoming a ‘data-driven practice’ means monitoring key statistics, such as revenue and patient demographics, and utilising them to create a strong business plan. A data-driven business is one that uses real-time, quantitative, and accurate data to constantly improve services and performance.

In the long term, monitoring business analytics will enable you to respond directly to the areas of your business that need improvement, adapt to the ever-changing market, and ultimately build a more successful business. 

Read this article ‘Launching your private healthcare practice: where to begin’ for the basics on starting your private practice!

Get to know your business

In order to use your data, you need to be able to track and monitor key statistics such as financial performance, marketing operations, and patient demographics. 

Perhaps you are only just starting out with your private practice, in which case the most important thing is to put in place a system to track your data. If your practice isn’t monitoring and updating patient information, practice activity, revenue, and cash flow, there’s no way to obtain an accurate review of your business’s successes and failures. 

An established practice may already be tracking these statistics, but then the question is how? Do you use multiple management tools across the board, such as an external accountant or separate marketing software? 

Using multiple business management tools across your practice can make it harder to obtain a clear picture of how well your business is performing. The data becomes harder to pull and collate into one clear overview. In order to get the most out of your business management efforts, you need to obtain a full and in-depth overview of your practice operations. 

What to track?

There are a few key statistics that are always going to be important to monitor, such as revenue, cash flow, and patient numbers. However, if you are aiming to achieve a particular goal or solve a specific issue, it is worth identifying the data you will need to support you in that area. 

For example, if you want to improve patient retention rates you need to establish how satisfied your patients are with the service they receive. Or perhaps you want to know which of your clinics performs best financially. For this you would need to be able to see revenue split across different practice locations. 

By identifying the problems you would like to solve or the areas you would like to improve on, you can work backwards from the end goal to find the root cause and then apply your efforts and attention there. This method is much more efficient than struggling through numbers without really understanding what causes which outcomes in your practice. 

Building a data-driven business

Tracking your data is one thing, but putting it to use as you build your business is another. Once you have established areas of your business you can improve on, the next step is to create a strong business plan that will enable you to achieve these goals. 

Check out this article ‘7 Steps to writing a business plan for your healthcare business’ and download your free PDF plan!

Going forward, it is crucial to regularly check and update your metrics to see if your plan is taking you in the right direction. Following a business plan is no use if it doesn’t bring the results you desire. Regularly checking how your business is performing against your goals will allow you to adjust your business plan to make it more effective as you go. A strong business has to be flexible, adapting to the ever-changing demands of the industry and needs of customers. 

For more business tips and tricks, explore our Data-Driven Business Series on the Semble blog.