Kaiser Permanente Streamlines Operations With Analytics

The healthcare consortium has reduced patient waiting times and the amount of time hospital leaders spend manually preparing data for operational activities with data analytics.

Hospital administration has historically relied on highly manual processes, leading to delays in decision-making and patient care. But the rising use of analytics, machine learning, and AI is changing all that, a trend exemplified by healthcare consortium Kaiser Permanente, which set about overhauling the data operations of its 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices in the U.S in 2015.

"Waiting for an available bed during an emergency room visit or hospital admission, or waiting for discharge, is frustrating for patients and inefficient for hospital operations," says Dick Daniels, executive vice president and CIO at Kaiser Permanente. "Many data points are necessary to make these processes efficient, including hospital census, bed demand, room cleaning and availability, pending discharges, and many others."