Using Value to Prioritize and Guide Analytics Investments

With the advent of analytics, hospitals have new access to high quality, reliable data. In turn, this can fuel any number of outcomes improvement projects, but hospitals have finite resources to expend on these initiatives. A process is needed to identify which ones will deliver the highest value and best align with the hospital’s overarching priorities.
To balance the demand for analytics support of improvement projects Mission Health designed a prioritization tool that has helped them identify the right projects to approve–while keeping stakeholders more engaged than ever in improving outcomes for patients.
To date, 80 percent of 55 approved projects have met or exceeded their initial targets. Actual realized targets include:

32 percent reduction in sepsis mortality
20 percent improved compliance with the sepsis care process
7 percent reduction in LOS for bowel surgery patients

How to Reduce Clinical Variation and Improve Outcomes While Demonstrating a Positive ROI

Clinical variation can be frustrating for patients and their families, often leaving the impression that healthcare team members are not on the same page and don’t agree on the plan for the patient’s diagnosis or treatment. It is also costly—the Institute of Medicine estimates that $265 billion (30 percent) of healthcare spending is waste that directly results from clinical variation.
To reduce unwanted variation, Texas Children’s Hospital invested considerable resources to develop clinical standards tools, including evidence-based order sets; however, demonstrating the effectiveness and utilization of those guidelines, pathways, and order sets had been daunting. To that end, Texas Children’s deployed an analytics platform from Health Catalyst to aggregate and analyze the data needed to perform both of these critical functions.
Results:

$2,401 reduction in cost per patient with order set utilization, and an 8.4-day difference in average length of stay (LOS).
$15 million reduction in total direct variable costs in Fiscal Year 2015, $32 million anticipated reduction in Fiscal Year 2016 at the current order set usage rate, and a potential $64 million annual reduction with a hypothetical 80 percent order set usage rate.
1,629 percent return on investment (ROI).

The Improvement Methodology From Thibodaux That TJC Calls “Best Practice”

Thibodaux Regional Medical Center has always excelled in delivering quality care to its patients, but a fundamental tenet of its culture is continuous improvement.
Driving that continuous improvement is a methodology The Joint Commission called “best practice in how to use data and get physicians engaged.” This quality improvement methodology centers around a three-systems care transformation model that includes best-practice care protocols, analytics, and rapid time-to-value analytics application development and frontline clinician adoption.

Keys to Successful Quality Improvement: A CEO’s Perspective

We believe healthcare is undergoing a transformation and that CEOs need to promote a culture of dialogue and adaptive learning to drive continuous quality improvement. Thirty years ago Greg Stock, CEO of Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, was seated in a healthcare conference when he heard a presenter say, “Thirty percent of clinical care is waste.” These words triggered something in Stock that sent him down a relentless path to transforming healthcare in his community.
Learn how Stock is leading and sustaining outcomes by establishing a culture of quality with an adaptive leadership style, engaging physicians, and using analytics, best practices and adoption processes that work.

How an ACO Provides and Arranges for the Best Patient Care Using Clinical and Operational Analytics

Crystal Run Healthcare—a physician-led Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and one of the first ACOs to participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program—is experiencing the long-anticipated shift toward more value-based reimbursement.  To ensure financial stability as they assume more risk, Crystal Run is implementing a strategy focused on rapid growth and aligning physician reimbursement with favorable patient outcomes. To effectively execute on this strategy they knew they needed to become more data-driven.  Learn how this ACO is using advanced analytics to execute on their population management and growth strategies with a focus on continuous improvement in the following areas: 1) Ensuring patient care aligns with evidence based practices, 2) reducing clinical variation, 3) enhancing operational efficiency, analyzing data from a “single source of truth” integrated from their EMR, billing, costing, patient satisfaction and other operational system, and 5) making “self-service analytics” available to decision-makers to decrease time to decision.