Interpreting medical claims data with visual analytics

The healthcare industry generates as much as 30 percent of the world’s stored data. A single patient creates an estimated 80 megabytes in medical imaging and electronic medical record (EMR) data each year, while the average hospital produces around 50 petabytes of data in that time.

Patient and provider information of this volume has the power to inform stakeholder sales strategies, fuel innovation, and improve care outcomes. But there’s a catch: in order to utilize healthcare claims data to your advantage, you have to be able to understand and interpret it.

Definitive Healthcare data shows that a company developing medical devices for congestive heart failure (CHF) patients had a potential market of nearly 2 million U.S. patients in the 2022 claims year. But how do they put this information into a more meaningful context? How do they shape all of this available data into an actionable strategy?

Data visualization tools create stories around analytics and allow people to see and understand the data in a way that they might not have been able to before. With access to a tool like the DHC Visuals dashboard, users can see proprietary data, account intelligence, and all-payor claims analytics displayed in one interactive, graphic layout.

In this blog, we’ll look at three ways that you can leverage data visualization tools to inform your business and drive your sales strategy.

1. Determine your best territory plan

Visually engaging, interactive maps provide users with an at-a-glance method for gauging both national and regional market size—giving you a visual representation of where those nearly 2 million congestive heart failure patients are seeking treatment.

The heatmap pictured below shows CHF patient concentrations by hospital, with the size of each plot point representing relative hospital patient volumes. At a first glance, users can see that the Northeast, Southeast, and Midwest regions report the highest volumes of congestive heart failure patients. From there, they can focus their sales efforts in those areas with the greatest patient demand.

2022 CHF patient volume by hospital

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Fig. 1 Analysis of data from the DHC Visuals Hospital Therapy Area Analytics dashboard for congestive heart failure. Medical claims data is sourced from multiple clearinghouses for the 2022 claims year. 

On the DHC Visuals dashboard, users can access a list of the top hospitals either by national market or by selected regional market. The list populates hospital-level detail like total number of CHF patients, total charges, number of ER visits, length of stay, CHF patient readmission rates, and more.

Using this data, we’ve created a list of the top 20 hospitals by total CHF patients. CHF patient totals are represented by each hospital’s percentage share of the more than 75,000 patients seen across all 20 hospitals.