Interview

Dr. Lukas Kwietniewski

Director of Healthcare Analysis at Statista

Statista’s approach to healthcare market analysis is unique

Statista’s unique approach to healthcare market analysis combines extensive data sources, proprietary surveys, and expert collaboration. A rigorous methodology, including data validation and expert review, ensures accurate and transparent rankings. By analyzing trends in areas like digital health and patient-centered care, Statista provides valuable insights for policymakers to address future healthcare challenges proactively. ‘Hospitals’ magazine featured an interview with Dr. Lukas Kwietniewski, Director of Health Care Analysis at Statista, discussing the company’s mission and unique approach to the healthcare market.

Can you tell us about your role at Statista and your journey in the healthcare industry? What inspired your focus on healthcare analysis?

At Statista, I lead our collaboration with Newsweek on prestigious and meaningful global healthcare rankings, such as the World’s Best Hospitals, the World’s Best Specialized Hospitals, and the World’s Best Smart Hospitals. My healthcare journey started with an academic foundation in health economics, focusing on the cost-efficiency of healthcare providers. After earning my PhD, I headed the health economics division at a leading German research institute, where I saw firsthand how data can transform patient care and optimize healthcare systems. Today, I channel this passion for data-driven insights into creating rankings that guide hospitals worldwide in their pursuit of excellence and help patients make informed decisions.

How does healthcare analysis fit into Statista’s broader mission?

Statista’s mission is to provide reliable, data-driven insights that empower decision-makers. The rankings of the World’s Best Hospitals, Specialized Hospitals, and Smart Hospitals are key to this mission, as they bring transparency and benchmarking tools to healthcare organizations worldwide. By highlighting excellence, we encourage hospitals to innovate and continuously improve.

What makes Statista’s approach to healthcare market analysis unique compared to other research firms?

Statista’s approach to healthcare market analysis is unique due to its combination of extensive data sources, proprietary surveys, and collaboration with a global board of renowned experts. Our rankings integrate robust quantitative metrics, including hospital quality indicators and patient outcomes, with qualitative insights from healthcare professionals. Additionally, programs like our Smart Hospitals and PROMs Implementation Surveys enable hospitals to submit data directly to Statista, enriching our analysis and ensuring precision. 

This holistic and data-driven methodology ensures globally relevant and actionable insights and fosters transparency and continuous improvement within the healthcare sector. Moreover, what sets us apart is the leverage of Statista’s global presence, data platform, and the extensive reach of our media partner, Newsweek, to ensure maximum visibility and market relevance for our research outcomes.

How does Statista ensure accuracy and transparency in its healthcare-related rankings and insights?

For our rankings, we adhere to a rigorous and transparent methodology. This includes analyzing patient outcomes, quality indicators, expert opinions, and patient experience data. To ensure the validity of our survey data, we manually check all submitted responses daily for anomalies. Furthermore, we have automated processes to detect outliers in the submitted data, i.e., time stamps of submitted surveys. We also detect self-recommendations or pre-coordinated votes (within affiliated institutions, between affiliated institutions and physicians, or across affiliated institutions). The combination of manual and automated processes allows us to ensure the reliability and validity of our results. Every ranking is accompanied by detailed methodology documentation to ensure clarity and trust among stakeholders. We also engage with our global board of experts to validate our findings and ensure the rankings reflect current healthcare standards. Regular updates to our methodologies further enhance the reliability and relevance of our insights, helping healthcare providers and patients make informed decisions.

How does Statista’s data analysis contribute to predicting future healthcare challenges, such as pandemics or aging populations, to aid policymakers in proactive planning?

By leveraging insights from rankings such as the World’s Best Hospitals, we can identify key trends in healthcare delivery and innovation. For instance, our Smart Hospitals rankings shed light on the adoption of digital technologies, which play a critical role in addressing future challenges like pandemics, the growing demands of aging populations, and improving operational efficiency. 

Additionally, through our Patient Reported Outcomes Implementation Survey, we measure the adoption of patient-centered care practices globally, providing unique insights into how hospitals progress toward patient-centered care. These data-driven findings highlight areas of excellence and serve as benchmarks to inspire continuous improvement across the global healthcare landscape. In addition, we engage in continuous discussions with our board of experts and global healthcare leaders, enabling us to stay abreast of the latest priorities and emerging trends at the forefront of healthcare decision-makers’ agendas. 

How is data shaping the future of healthcare innovation and decision-making?

Data enables predictive modeling, personalized medicine, and more efficient resource allocation for healthcare providers using data to optimize processes. It drives innovation in healthcare by uncovering trends, improving patient outcomes, and optimizing hospital operations. The integration of AI will further revolutionize healthcare decision-making beyond what we already see today. Additionally, real-time data analysis enhances the ability to respond to public health crises, such as pandemics, by effectively identifying patterns and deploying resources. Data and, more importantly, benchmarking data to create insights will be a key drive to address the challenges healthcare systems are increasingly facing today, such as workforce shortages or access to care, and will drive the global transformation of healthcare delivery.

Can you share examples of how Statista’s healthcare insights have helped hospitals, healthcare providers, or policymakers make critical decisions?

Our globally recognized rankings provide hospitals with valuable benchmarks to evaluate their performance and identify areas for improvement. Building on this, the Statista Global Hospital Rating program offers an in-depth assessment that enables hospitals to analyze their strengths and areas for improvement across five key categories: provision of care, timeliness of care, patient experience & safety, IT & healthcare technology, and employer attractiveness. This program empowers healthcare providers to refine the healthcare delivery process, adopt advanced technologies, and enhance operational efficiency. 

Moreover, it fosters a culture of continuous improvement by providing actionable insights that help hospitals achieve excellence in patient outcomes and organizational performance.

For more information on the Global Hospital Rating, please visit www.globalhospitalrating.com. Additionally, we perform customized benchmarking projects for healthcare providers independently of the rankings and ratings. These are tailor-made to measure and advance quality and transformation according to the organization’s specific needs, i.e., for national hospital associations.

What challenges do you face in collecting and analyzing healthcare data globally? How do you address them?

Our global rankings involve data collection across diverse healthcare systems, each with varying levels of transparency and data quality. To address this challenge, we rely on a combination of direct data submission for our PROMs implementation survey, expert surveys, and publicly available data, ensuring our methodologies are consistent and credible. Importantly, we only compare quality metrics nationally, highlighting healthcare providers excelling in their specific context. For our global top list of the World’s Best Hospitals, we have introduced three components for Quality Metrics Excellence (top 20% in their country), Patient Satisfaction Excellence (top 20% in their country), and the score from our PROMs Implementation Survey. 

This tailored approach ensures that hospitals are recognized for their achievements relative to the unique challenges of their local healthcare systems while maintaining global comparability. For Global Hospital Rating, Statista takes extensive steps to validate every submission: All data is verified for outliers and plausibility, and documents or URLs must be submitted as proof wherever possible. Additionally, we perform data validation calls with every hospital in the Rating process to ensure we can address any issues or questions regarding the data before completing the process.

In markets with limited transparency or incomplete healthcare data, how does Statista maintain the credibility of its rankings and insights?

For regions with limited data, we emphasize surveys of healthcare professionals and stakeholder engagement to promote the availability of publicly available quality metrics and patient satisfaction data. Additionally, we are transparent about our methodologies, ensuring credibility even in less data-rich environments. Programs like our Smart Hospitals and PROMs Implementation Survey allow hospitals to submit data directly to Statista, enriching our datasets and enabling more accurate analysis. Furthermore, the Statista Global Hospital Rating provides a globally standardized framework for evaluating hospitals, ensuring consistency and reliability across diverse healthcare systems. In the Global Hospital Rating program, hospitals submit data to Statista directly, which would otherwise not be available for us to evaluate. This allows us to provide an in-depth evaluation even in markets where publicly available data might be limited.

How does Statista handle ethical considerations and patient confidentiality when working with healthcare data?

Statista strictly adheres to data protection regulations such as GDPR. When working with sensitive healthcare data, we anonymize information, prioritize ethical considerations, and collaborate only with trustworthy sources. Importantly, Statista does not receive patient data directly; we rely exclusively on publicly available data sources to ensure compliance with privacy standards.

Furthermore, all our methodologies undergo rigorous reviews to align with ethical guidelines, maintaining the integrity and trustworthiness of our healthcare insights.

Statista collaborates with high-profile media partners. Can you share an example of how your healthcare analysis has been showcased through these partnerships?

Our partnership with Newsweek for the World’s Best Hospitals and other rankings is a prime example. These rankings are published globally and reach millions of Newsweek readers annually, offering hospitals visibility and recognition for excellence. 

This partnership brings credibility and ensures the rankings get a broad audience, including healthcare leaders, policymakers, and patients. The rankings have become a trusted resource for identifying top-performing hospitals worldwide and are frequently referenced in media, industry discussions, and healthcare conferences. Additionally, we are increasingly engaging directly with the global healthcare community through events such as the World Hospital Congress, where we share insights and foster discussions on data-driven improvements in healthcare.

What role do partnerships with healthcare institutions or businesses play in Statista’s success in this field?

Partnerships are central to Statista’s success in the healthcare sector, as they enable us to leverage the expertise and credibility of trusted institutions. For example, we collaborate with ICHOM (International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement) to develop our PROMs Implementation Survey, which helps assess the adoption of patient-centered care practices globally. These partnerships enhance the quality and relevance of our insights and align with our mission to improve healthcare by providing data-driven benchmarks. We are always exploring opportunities to expand our partnership network with organizations that share our commitment to advancing healthcare outcomes and fostering innovation.

What innovations in healthcare are you most excited about, and how is Statista contributing to this transformation?

I’m particularly excited about AI-driven diagnostics and personalized medicine advancements, which will transform healthcare delivery and greatly improve patient outcomes. Statista contributes by providing the data and insights needed to evaluate these innovations’ effectiveness and scalability, helping stakeholders adopt transformative technologies.

How is Statista leveraging AI and machine learning in its healthcare insights?

Statista’s team of data analysts and data scientists is at the forefront of deploying advanced analysis methods, including AI and machine learning. These technologies enable us to efficiently analyze data for tens of thousands of hospitals annually, continuously improving our processes and methods. By leveraging AI, we streamline complex data processing tasks and enhance the accuracy of our rankings, for example, by using AI as one additional data validation layer while ensuring that current limitations of AI, such as hallucinations, are accounted for. Our team continuously integrates innovations as these technologies evolve to ensure we remain a leader in delivering cutting-edge healthcare insights.

What are the biggest opportunities for growth in the healthcare sector in the next five years? How can data help capitalize on them?

The next five years present transformative growth opportunities in healthcare, particularly in precision medicine and the expansion of digital health solutions. Precision medicine enables treatments to be tailored to individual patients based on genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, with data playing a pivotal role in analyzing vast genomic datasets and real-world evidence to create more effective, personalized therapies. Digital health solutions, such as telemedicine and wearable technologies, are revolutionizing patient engagement and chronic disease management, allowing providers to harness real-time data to monitor health, predict potential issues, and intervene proactively. For the Middle East region, the expansion of preventative and primary care services to address chronic conditions such as diabetes and the rapid adoption of digital health technologies such as telemedicine are major growth factors. By leveraging robust datasets and innovative technologies, the healthcare sector is poised to achieve meaningful improvements in delivery and care.

What message would you like to share with healthcare leaders in the Middle East about the importance of data-driven decision-making?

Data-driven decision-making is essential for achieving excellence in healthcare, as demonstrated by Statista’s and Newsweek’s globally recognized rankings. For healthcare leaders in the Middle East, we already see that leading hospitals are investing significant resources toward analyzing their market position and the perception of their services. In many cases, these hospitals already have a wide range of internal and external data available; however, these results have not yet been published. Embracing data on a wider scale and fostering transparency are critical steps toward demonstrating excellence to the broader public, enhancing patient outcomes, and driving innovation. By leveraging insights from data, healthcare organizations can not only benchmark their performance but also identify opportunities for continuous improvement and global competitiveness. In an era of rapid technological advancements in healthcare, investing in data infrastructure and analytics capabilities will empower Middle Eastern healthcare systems to lead in delivering cutting-edge care. Lastly, promoting transparency will enable leading hospitals in the region to communicate their excellence to a broader public, strengthening trust and showcasing their achievements on a global stage.

Related Articles

Back to top button