How Smarter Analytics and LLMs Are Giving Providers the Breathing Room They Need

Analytics hold immense potential to reshape healthcare, but when misapplied, they often overwhelm providers with too much irrelevant information, complicating workflows and patient care.

“Healthcare practices need analytics that are simple, actionable, and intuitive,” says Dr. Dany Dominguez Perez, vice president of clinical analytics and population health at NextGen Healthcare.

In this conversation, Dr. Dominguez Perez dives into exciting advances in analytics and their impact on healthcare delivery. He reveals how  the NextGen® Enterprise Data Warehouse and NextGen® Insights Solutions are transforming healthcare operations—unlocking deeper clinical insights, identifying care gaps, and ensuring practices focus on what matters most, all without adding to the burden of already overstretched teams.

Q: How does better access to analytics empower healthcare teams to make more informed decisions in their daily practice?

Dominguez Perez: When healthcare teams have better access to analytics, they can address more complexities while prioritizing their most critical tasks. This empowerment starts with simplicity. A centralized system with single sign-on capabilities ensures that all relevant data is in one place and can be tailored to the specific roles of team members. For example, instead of everyone in the practice consuming the same generic reports, analytics should be segmented by job role, ensuring actionable information reaches the appropriate team member. Providers need clinical insights and risk-assessment analysis at the point of care, while operational and financial analytics benefit practice managers and executives.

NextGen’s Enterprise Data Warehouse has multiple engines that analyze complex medication combinations and patients with multiple comorbidities, providing advanced clinical decision support. There is no time to go through this mentally during a 20-minute visit, so having something at the point of care that does that for you is crucial. Intentional planning with leadership backing is vital, or even the most sophisticated intuitive platform will fall short.

Q: How can healthcare teams use data-driven insights to address inefficiencies without adding to their workloads?

Dominguez Perez: Healthcare teams are grappling with increasing complexity from payer requirements to care coordination. That’s why having a dedicated leader focused on data strategy is critical. By sharing only targeted, relevant information with the appropriate teams, inefficiencies can be significantly reduced. For example, analytics can help COOs direct the right information to call centers, front-desk staff, and care teams, ensuring that each group addresses its specific responsibilities without being overwhelmed. Analytics can also streamline patient communication by aggregating outreach efforts. Too often, patients receive overlapping calls from various team members, which leads to confusion and wasted resources. Centralizing communications eliminates redundancy.

Automation is also crucial for reducing inefficiencies without adding more work. Practices can leverage historical data to optimize staffing, reduce patient wait times, and predict patient volumes. Additionally, ambient listening technology can document provider-patient conversations directly into the chart, using large language models (LLMs) to suggest precise CPT and ICD codes that accurately reflect the patient’s condition, saving providers hours of administrative time.

Q: How do you balance the need for actionable data with the risk of overwhelming healthcare teams with too much information?

Dominguez Perez: According to HRSA, nearly half of providers experience burnout. This is often due to the high number of complex decisions they face daily. The key to managing this, again, lies in delivering data that is role-specific, intuitive, and prioritized. For example, care teams in charge of rooming patients need two pieces of information: a list of patients who frequently miss their appointments and times when they are most likely to show up, while management-level staff require trends and patterns to guide interventions. At the C-suite level, leaders need only key performance indicators (KPIs) that signal overall progress.

Overloading teams with complex graphs and datasets leads to confusion and inefficiency. It takes the average person between 60 seconds and two minutes to understand a chart, a graph, or other detailed data visualizations. Dashboards must be intuitive and designed to accommodate different preferences. We allow users to choose formats that are easiest for them to interpret for quick decision-making. Finally, prioritization is critical. Practices should focus on a few high-impact KPIs rather than attempting to address all areas simultaneously. Establishing workflows and training staff for these priorities ensures successful implementation and prepares teams for future changes.

Q: Looking ahead, what excites you most about how data and analytics are transforming patient care and healthcare delivery?

Dominguez Perez: The potential of analytics to drive personalized medicine is particularly exciting. By combining genomics with vast datasets, we can tailor treatments to individual patients in ways previously unimaginable. As a Cuban-born medical doctor, I find this especially important. Many medications today were tested on limited demographics. Machine learning is helping close these gaps by analyzing broader datasets.

Wearables powered by LLMs are also advancing rapidly, offering greater precision and relevance. These devices are more capable of detecting when an older person falls or when their oxygen level drops, helping providers act quickly. Preventive medicine is also set to benefit greatly. Sophisticated algorithms can detect early signs of chronic conditions, enabling interventions before they escalate. Meanwhile, enterprise data tools like ours prioritize the 20% of data that answers the most pressing questions, focusing on what truly matters. This allows organizations to address personalization, prevention, and efficiency, creating a smarter and more effective healthcare system.