From NICU Decisions to Hospital Systems: Where Analytics Investments Deliver Life-Saving Value

Hospital care teams make decisions that can have life-or-death consequences, and they do it as quickly as possible with information that's often incomplete. While spending several months in a neonatal intensive care unit, Abhijith Anand, an assistant professor of information systems at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, observed the case of a premature infant with "patent ductus arteriosus," a birth defect in the heart.

The care team worked with fragmented data that included bedside observations, imaging, lab values, ventilator settings, medication responses and notes from different specialists.

"I saw firsthand how analytics could shape decisions and treatment pathways," Anand said. "A neonatologist may be concerned about one trend, while a cardiologist may weigh another more heavily, and the team may spend valuable time reconciling those perspectives rather than acting on a more complete picture."

In a paper recently published in MIS Quarterly, Anand and two co-authors studied how analytics investments performed across a range of clinical settings. Hospitals are increasingly investing in systems designed to collect and interpret data, but in their conversations with healthcare executives, Anand and his colleagues kept hearing the same thing: despite heavy investment, relatively few people were using these tools, and practitioners did not have a complete picture on what clinical processes would benefit the most from analytics. "That question of where analytics truly changes care, why and how long, became the origin of this research," Anand said.

Analytics Systems That Create Most Value

The study analyzed five years of data from 11 U.S. hospitals. They found that, in more routine environments such as lab testing or medical imaging, analytics systems can streamline workflows and reduce errors, but those efficiency gains tend to level off over time. The biggest opportunities lie in more complex areas of care, where decisions depend on coordination across specialists and rapidly changing patient conditions.

When a patient arrives in the emergency room with a gunshot wound, for example, doctors must process dozens of indicators that can change minute by minute, along with signals coming from different parts of the care team. In those first minutes, the team must decide whether to operate immediately or stabilize the patient first. Analytics tools can pull those signals together, identify patterns and present a more complete picture of the patient's condition. "That is the kind of high-complexity setting where analytics can be especially valuable, because the challenge is not just collecting and integrating data, but intelligently synthesizing it quickly enough to support better clinical judgment," Anand said.

The tradeoff, however, is time.

Returns on Properly Deployed Analytics

The study found that analytics investments in more complex clinical settings generated, on average, nearly 75% higher returns in process efficiency and 93% higher returns in productivity compared to less complex settings. Those benefits, however, took roughly five times longer to emerge. That timing gap can create challenges for hospital leaders under pressure to show results quickly.

For hospitals, that means aligning expectations with the complexity of clinical work. "The value of analytics investments is not the same across all clinical processes. By prioritizing lower-value areas, hospitals risk incurring higher sunk costs while missing opportunities to invest in high-impact clinical processes," Anand said.

For patients, those decisions can have real consequences. In complex clinical settings, where care depends on fast, coordinated decisions across teams, better use of data can mean earlier interventions, fewer delays and improved treatment outcomes. As a result, the question isn't whether analytics systems could improve patient care, but where they work best and how long organizations are willing to wait for the results.

About the Sam M. Walton College of Business: The Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas is one of the nation's leading public business schools, serving more than 10,300 students across undergraduate, master's and doctoral programs. Through applied learning, impactful research, and deep industry partnerships, Walton prepares leaders to compete and innovate in a global economy.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $3 billion to Arkansas' economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research and Economic Development News.