Predictive Analytics Facilitate a Successful Health System Growth Strategy

Placing your service lines, retail clinics, and outpatient facilities in optimal locations may mean the difference between success and failure in today’s competitive marketplace. These days, it’s no longer enough to make decisions about where to locate new offerings based on available sites or what an organization “thinks” might work.

Rather, the savviest organizations are making very strategic moves based on information gleaned from existing data about customers’ wants, needs, and behaviors.

Pamela Ladu, MBA, Assistant Vice President, Ambulatory Planning and Logistics, Cooper University Health Care.

Cooper University Health Care in Southern New Jersey serves more than half a million patients a year in a fast-paced and densely populated area where the cost of living is steep. The stakes are high, and Cooper can’t afford missteps along the road to success.

This fact recently prompted the organization to turn to predictive consumer analytics to get a deeper understanding of the needs and opportunities that exist in its target area, according to Pamela Ladu, MBA, Assistant Vice President, Ambulatory Planning and Logistics for Cooper. Ladu shared Cooper’s experiences with predictive analytics at the 2016 HMPS conference and also spoke with SHCM personally.

Cooper has been using household-level consumer analysis and data to evaluate possible sites by forecasting potential visits, predicting what impact a new location might have on existing services, and determining what competition a new facility would face, as well as how it might fare in the current and future marketplace.

Ladu explains that one of the key factors her organization has discovered through the mapping tool is how far patients are willing to travel for different types of services, which helps a great deal to home in on the site selection. For instance, primary care, internal medicine, OB-GYN, and pediatrics are all typically placed right in the communities where people live and work. On the other hand, more specialized services like neurology, cardiology, orthopedics, and oncology can be placed a little farther, as people are likely to travel longer distances for the expertise they need.

For details on the mapping tool Cooper is using, as well as how it helps match resources to patient needs and preferences, read the full article now: How One Health Care Organization Uses Predictive Analytics to Avoid Growing Pains.

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President