How Select Health Uses Data to Drive Operational Success

The strategic use of data is a critical component in making good business decisions and optimizing operations. Actionable data provides insights that can be analyzed for multiple purposes and tailored to find various solutions to challenges. In the world of business and sales, data can be used to shine a light on important details and provide insights that help guide strategy—this is no different in the world of health insurance.

Data not only allows us to identify opportunities for improvement, but it also helps us become more efficient in our daily roles and contributes to the company’s growth and expansion within our current and prospective markets. Additionally, we are able to streamline our processes to expand caregivers’ capacity, allowing them to focus on more impactful projects. We rely on data to help us reach our goals of operational improvement and success. Data provides valuable insights into the inner workings of our organization and brings attention and transparency to our successes as well as the challenges we have yet to solve.

Why we are data driven

Being data driven ensures our efforts and sales strategies are and remain efficient—from a process, organization, and caregiver standpoint. It helps us provide members with continuous support, answers, and an improved experience. We use data to measure our progress on growth goals as well as gauge our operational capacity.

Becoming a data-driven organization

Determining the data needed

Quick access to data helps us measure our success and failures to meet department and company goals. Good data helps us to identify and address challenges early, so we can stay on course and are able to correct our direction if needed. However, with access to almost unlimited data, it can be difficult to determine the key data points that make the most sense to measure for a particular goal or process. We take the following steps to ensure we remain on track with our team and organization goals:

• We start and remain curious and ask a lot of questions. As a team, we need to consistently determine if we are using the right data that will help us reach our goals. By doing this, we stay curious and try to be nimble enough to make changes that lead to positive outcomes.
  
  
• We identify data that is actionable. Even though we generate a lot of data points, we need to be able to act on the information we receive. We try to eliminate the use of data that isn't meaningful and actionable. When we look at data, we focus on measuring the things that can improve the member experience, make efficiency gains, or identify what we can stop doing.
  
  
• We frequently review our progress and outcomes. It can take time and multiple attempts to determine what the right data is to measure outcomes. What we initially thought was the appropriate measure may have shifted as we altered our goals and projects. It is important to frequently revisit our progress and the associated outcomes to determine if we are being successful.

Identifying solutions

We identify processes that are repetitive or those that have a high error rates and then we start an automation process review to determine the feasibility of automation. Automation streamlines processes and improves efficiency, reliability, and accuracy, which prepares us for quick organizational growth with limited disruption. Our caregivers also benefit from automated processes. Their capacity increases, which allows them to concentrate on other high-value projects and tasks that need additional attention. Not all of our processes can be automated, however. In these situations, we investigate other potential solutions and look for ways to be more efficient.

With the momentum we have gained from using data to drive our operational success, we can continuously improve our processes and move forward at a steady pace. Data continues to be the key component in determining our successes and uncovering opportunities for improvements. As Peter Drucker, the management consultant, educator, and author, once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Related: How the Digital Experience Impacts Health Insurance