Role of Competitive Intelligence Services in Healthcare
Over-the-counter medicines can provide temporary relief. So, people want professional healthcare services for comprehensive diagnosis and treatment. However, many hospitals and pharmaceutical companies must compete to engage patients and conduct their operations in a financially sustainable manner. This post will elaborate on how competitive intelligence can improve healthcare services.
What is Competitive Intelligence (CI) for the Healthcare Industry?
Competitive intelligence includes collecting data on market trends, an organization’s internal activities, competitors’ strategies, and public policies. For example, a data processing partner can provide healthcare market research to help you learn why patients go to your rival clinics or use the medicine offered by your competitors.
Healthcare competitive intelligence will modify conventional CI services to help hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, assistive technology developers, and public health departments.
The obtained databases assist healthcare consulting firms in researching new workflows and analyzing a business’s competitors. If you work in this industry, such firms can help you thrive in the life sciences and pharma markets.
Role of Competitive Intelligence in Healthcare Services
1| Identifying Inefficient Operations
Reporting delays can cause the infection to spread more if the patient is suffering from bacterial or viral diseases. Similarly, many healthcare consulting firms highlight the significance of regularly upgrading your laboratory equipment to accelerate analyzing blood, saliva, tissues, or urine samples.
However, multi-specialty hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that offer several categories of medicines often have different departments with unique workflows. So, standard competitive intelligence services can help small healthcare facilities.
More prominent healthcare consulting firms will require a more powerful CI management infrastructure to inspect the inefficient operations that have increased the cost of facilitating healthcare services.
2| Monitoring Competitor Announcements
Multiple brands offer mobility-enhancing equipment that integrates connectivity, and patients gladly pay a premium to purchase such devices. Your competitor might be planning to launch new clinical devices with value-added features. Therefore, you must track your competitors. Later, you can devise a strategy to prevent your customers from buying your competitors’ products.
Some services used in healthcare competitive intelligence might scan the rivals’ websites, press releases, and social proofs across platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. They will estimate your competitors’ strategy for the next business quarter to improve their market positioning.
Meanwhile, gathering intelligence on competitive peers also helps you recognize industry trends concerned with technological innovations or business partnership opportunities. Pharma and assistive technology firms should also build these CI databases for peer benchmarking.
3| Evaluating Patient Satisfaction
You can create online surveys for healthcare market research to collect data on how people suffering from a specific disorder perceive a treatment strategy. Doctors and pharma companies already use a preliminary questionnaire to understand the patient’s circumstances.
However, healthcare professionals must also understand if patients are reasonably comfortable throughout their hospitalization. Collecting patient feedback might give you more practical insights into how nurses’ social management skills help reduce the anxiety experienced by patients during their stay at the hospital.
Also, some patients might hesitate to consent to treatment because they require more guidance to understand the difference between minimally and highly invasive surgical operations. Analyzing patient feedback also reveals opportunities to create marketing material, educate people about medical practices, and increase the trust they are willing to put in your healthcare services.
4| Complying with Revised Legal Directives
What legal considerations determine whether a doctor can conduct a highly invasive surgery on an unconscious person’s body? Remember, different countries conceptualize this entire scenario through a unique lens.
Patients’ informed consent is indispensable to surgeons. Besides, you must extensively document and communicate the risks of operating on a body organ. All these activities enable you to prepare a patient’s family members for the possibility that the surgery may fail, resulting in irregular body movements, a coma, or even death.
Laws and regulations that govern a hospital’s rights and duties will also undergo periodic revisions. Moreover, you require consent before sharing a patient’s medical records with an independent research organization. Healthcare market research systems observe how different countries and professional bodies periodically update the legal status of ethically disputed medical activities.
5| Tracking Employee Productivity and Inventory Dynamics
Competitive intelligence datasets include records on how each employee creates value for the organization. After all, your business development strategies require responsible execution by the staff to keep all stakeholders happy.
For example, hospitals want to ensure that the resident doctors and the nursing staff complete their daily tasks without mistakes. Clinical device vendors must assess whether some staff members require further training to improve productivity.
Healthcare facilities are responsible for patients’ safe recovery. Therefore, they cannot tolerate employees who exhibit questionable work ethics. Some competitive intelligence services include human resources and inventory control modules to help monitor employee performance.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry realized its limitations in 2020, and data-driven market research components like competitive intelligence services have witnessed an increased demand. Simultaneously, new technologies allow the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries to leverage online connectivity for continuous data collection.
Hospitals have digitalized how they record patient observations and share the results of lab tests. Medical equipment manufacturers use competitive intelligence to identify new product ideas and study user feedback. Yet, researchers and telemedicine platforms explore further digitalization opportunities in healthcare and pharma.
A leader in healthcare consulting, SG Analytics helps clinicians and pharmacists improve their business strategies to facilitate patient-friendly service delivery. Contact us today if you want insights into medical research and modern healthcare trends.
