The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.
If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.
This question this time: What are examples of major operational or clinical successes your organization has experienced in the past year from using analytics or data reporting tools?
No operational successes of any kind as our medical staff as well as administration does not even know the meaning of analytics nor what to do with it. We lack even the basic reporting capabilities needed to know our observation and LOS. We did well with core measures and scored high and used that as a marketing tip, however we did not use any sophisticated tools to get there. The physicians do not get any personal performance data to look at to compare with their peers and are not used to looking at their own data at all. It is part of the reason why I believe the institution failed so miserably and ended up being acquired by a lager hospital chain.
Improved GI lab throughput. Reduction in the use of blood products. Improvements in GI Billing process. Improvements in GI DNKA.
None.
Hard to know what success we have had from using analytics. If we decide, based on environmental scans and analytics to to focus on, say, total joint replacement, there will never be a time when we can say, “Ah, that was the right decision”, even if your hospital is still afloat, or doing well. It may be that another service line or focus or workflow or supplier would have been better. Analytics comforts us into thinking we aren’t making a WAG, but there aren’t answers in the back of the book. On the more micro level, cost-benefit does help balance the budget.
Over the past year we deployed reporting tools to our front-line providers, departments, sites, divisions and company-wide providing actual results compared to our goals for people, service, cost, quality, access, and primary care flow. Particularly in service and access we improved performance compared to baseline and moved closer to (and in some cases exceeded) goals. Patients report improved experiences and appointing wait times have come down. There’s probably a link between the two improvements.
We used some basic reporting tools to identify high risk patients who are overdue (e.g. diabetic with A1C over 8 not seen in six months). We then tried multiple methods of outreach and found email, letters and robocalls had minimal impact …read more
