AI and Data Science

The Healthcare Analytics Summit™ (HAS) 21 Virtual features internationally recognized speakers, national and global networking opportunities, and traditional HAS fun—including #Socks of HAS, quiz questions, daily scavenger hunts, prizes, and more. In addition, the 2021 global theme will take attendees on a virtual journey to three international destinations—Singapore, Dubai, and London—while exploring the digital trends and best practice experiences driving healthcare success in the new digital era.The HAS 21 Virtual world-class speaker line-up includes the following:1. Head Coach of the Golden State Warriors and two-time NBA Coach of the Year, Steve Kerr.2. AI Rana el Kaliouby, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva and pioneer and inventor of Emotion and Human Perception.3. Chris Chen, MD, CEO of ChenMed, and Brent James, MD, MStat, Clinical Professor, Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC), Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

To cut costs, healthcare leaders are looking at their greatest operating expense—labor management. However, with outdated labor management systems, decision makers rely on retrospective, incomplete data to forecast staffing volumes and patient support needs. Limited workforce insight can result in misaligned staffing or worse, jeopardizing patient care due to lack of labor support. With the Health Catalyst PowerLabor™ application, part of the Financial Empowerment Suite™, decision makers have access to a comprehensive view of labor data by organization, department, team, and job role. Timely insight into current and future hospital needs allows leaders to staff to patient volume, control escalating labor expenses, and ensure optimal resources for excellent patient care.

As value-based care (VBC) becomes more common in healthcare, population health leaders need a better approach to managing risk-based contracts and optimizing VBC strategies. Unfortunately, many health systems rely on outdated population health offerings that lack data integration capabilities and only provide a fragmented view of their populations. To pinpoint high-priority groups and succeed in VBC, organizations can rely on the Health Catalyst Value Optimizer™ solution. Value Optimizer aggregates and analyzes comprehensive patient data, then instantly identifies the most valuable opportunities for improvement throughout the care continuum. With a full-service solution and increased visibility into performance, leaders can master their VBC and ensure patients receive the best care at the lowest cost.

While the EHR increases the legibility and comprehensiveness of patient health data and makes vital insights more accessible, digitized records also drive longer workflows and hard-to-manage data volumes. Fortunately, the healthcare digital environment today also makes effective data curation achievable. With an automated EHR workflow, healthcare data and analytics technology mines the data platform, bringing the value of digital documentation directly to team members. Automation of routine, repeatable tasks, paired with curation of the most important information in the chart, allows providers and patients to benefit from the wealth of digitized documentation, as workflows ensure the right person accesses the right insight at the right place and time.

Resilience in healthcare means that organizations are continually ready to navigate disruptions of any size without sacrificing quality of care or patient and staff safety. Health systems maintain resilience by embedding the principles of high reliability into their culture, workflows, and processes. These high-reliability organizations (HROs) don’t approach reliability as a short-term project or checklist; rather, they embed the principles into every interaction and action beginning with senior leadership. As a result of a practice, not project, approach to reliability, HROs “rarely fail even though they encounter numerous unexpected events,” as authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe explain in their book series, “Managing the Unexpected.”

As health systems strive for financial growth and stability in a pandemic and shifting healthcare market, leaders often overlook a key opportunity to maximize profit margins for services rendered—a charge capture audit. A charge capture audit takes a deep dive into the charge capture process, exposing root causes of costly errors and suboptimal processes.These five steps derive critical insight to help health systems apply interventions and restore revenue integrity:1. Set the standard. 2. Measure current practice against the standard. 3. Compare the results at the standard to practice. 4. Change the practice to best practice. 5. Re-audit.

In the high-pressured world of value-based care, healthcare leadership is more important than ever. Leaders need to make data-driven decisions and respond to the increasing demands of patients while cutting costs.The right tools–ones that support today’s outcome-focused healthcare environment–can help leaders break through the noise to make effective decisions. This article shares three common problems faced by healthcare leadership and how Leading Wisely, a decision support tool helps them make informed decisions and guide their organizations forward. Three effective strategies for healthcare leadership include:1. How to prevent communication breakdown.2. How to break through measure madness.3. How to alleviate information overload and siloed reporting.

Health systems increasingly recognize data as one of their top strategic assets, but how many organizations have the processes and frameworks in place to protect their data? Without effective data governance, organizations risk losing trust in their data and its value in process and outcomes improvement; a 2018 survey indicated less than half of healthcare CIOs have strong trust in their data.By following five steps towards data governance, health systems can effectively steward data and grow and maintain trust in it as a critical asset:1. Identify the organizational priorities.2. Identify the data governance priorities.3. Identify and recruit the early adopters.4. Identify the scope of the opportunity appropriately.5. Enable early adopters to become enterprise data governance leaders and mentors.

How can health systems avoid just talking about improvement and instead achieve real progress in clinical quality performance? First, improvement teams need access to a robust data infrastructure that can provide a complete picture of performance. This analytic insight reveals process gaps and opportunity areas where the care team can target improvement efforts.After selecting an opportunity area, care teams are ready to follow the three-step process to achieve meaningful clinical improvement:1. The “why”: Identify the outcome goal.2. The “what”: Select a written, measurable, and time-sensitive process metric to evaluate the process.3. The “how”: Identify the best interventions that will support the desired change in a process.

Surviving on thin operating margins means health systems must maximize every financial earning opportunity. To identify threats to the revenue stream, organizations need access to precise, accurate costing information. An activity-based costing (ABC) system leverages patient resource utilization data to reveal exactly how much it costs to deliver care. Unlike traditional costing systems that provide average cost estimates for services rendered, ABC includes five benefits that help systems understand the cost for every aspect of the care delivery process:1. Comprehensive costing data.2. Ease of use.3. Precision and accuracy.4. Near real-time analytics.5. A proactive cost strategy.