Operational & Performance Management

Healthcare organizations need to be cognizant of their readiness for change, enabling them to create a plan that will enhance the organization’s ability to successfully drive change. While many studies have been completed on the importance of organizational readiness in non-healthcare organizations, there is little research and relatively few,  measurement tools focused specifically on healthcare organizations.
To cement the Pulse Heart Institute (Pulse Heart) as a destination for adult heart health, and ensure its long-term success, Pulse Heart required a better understanding of its readiness to drive and sustain outcomes improvements—which it found through an onsite assessment that leveraged the Health Catalyst® Outcomes Improvement Readiness Assessment (OIRA) framework. Using the assessment findings and subsequent recommendations, Pulse Heart successfully developed, and continues to develop, the findings to guide workplans to improve competencies and enable the organization for long-term outcomes improvements success.
Based on the results of the onsite readiness assessment they have identified and implemented interventions to improve readiness for change in each of the five major OIRA Tool categories:

Leadership, culture, and governance
Analytics
Best practices
Adoption
Financial Alignment

One in three women delivers via cesarean in the U.S., and more than 90 percent of them have repeat operations in subsequent deliveries. Despite numerous evidence-based guidelines and established best practices for labor and delivery, clinical care varies widely for many practices. Labor and delivery care varied at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, causing the organization to look for ways to standardize care.
To better understand variations in care, and opportunities to reduce its cost, the labor and delivery care transformation team at Thibodaux Regional used the Health Catalyst Labor and Delivery Advanced Application as well as the Financial Management Explorer application, which integrates data from billing and costing, and creates snapshots of current financial metrics.
Informing and educating providers with provider-specific data in conjunction with redesigned workflow, standardized supplies, and new, standardized protocols enabled the labor and delivery care transformation team at Thibodaux Regional to experience cost savings and improved outcomes, including:

24.4 percent relative reduction in the cost of care for uncomplicated vaginal delivery. Projected annual cost savings of $266,067.
22 percent relative reduction in the cost of care for cesarean deliveries. Projected annual cost savings of $346,856.

Allina Health needed to ensure the data it reported to regulatory agencies was timely and accurate. The integrated health system sees 100,000 inpatient hospital admissions annually, 340,000 emergency care visits, and 6,000 physicians and 1,600 nurses providing and documenting care. Due to the sheer volume of patients and employees, clinical data abstraction at Allina Health is not a small undertaking.
Looking to stay compliant while reducing resource utilization, Allina Health sought to change its workflow procedures for faster, more accurate clinical data abstraction. A large amount of clinical data required for compliance with CMS performance measures and Joint Commission Core Measure resides in unstructured data, such as narrative notes, which require manual data abstraction. With the help of data analytics, Allina Health was able to develop evidence-based standardized processes for clinical reporting and automate some clinical data abstraction.
Results:

76 percent relative improvement in time to data availability at each site. Data is typically available within 14 days of discharge, far exceeding the 30-day target.
95.5 percent accuracy for CMS validation.

Healthcare reimbursement continues to shift away from fee-for-service reimbursement models to value-based, risk-sharing agreements. This shift has resulted in organizations revising compensation strategies to engage physicians in value-based compensation arrangements. An effective value-based physician compensation plan is critically important, particularly in competitive environments where organizations must optimize the ability to recruit and retain highly skilled providers. One commonly used physician compensation approach includes a base salary and productivity incentives, coupled with additional compensation opportunities for achieving quality and service goals. The physician compensation package at John Muir Health is not only competitive, it is also complex, but the support process was burdensome, inefficient, and lacked transparency.
John Muir Health developed a plan to leverage the Health Catalyst® Analytics Platform, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications, to develop an automated process for physician compensation. The plan created efficiencies in time and effort across multiple domains and produced software to automate future work. The benefits included:

Saving 1,560 hours of time required to produce the data necessary to calculate physician compensation.
Successfully integrating more than ten different compensation models and 20 different data elements for more than 300 different providers into the physician compensation analytic application, automating the process.

With the current state of uncertainty facing healthcare organizations, survival requires unprecedented agility when it comes to acquiring and responding to meaningful, strategic information. After adopting the Health Catalyst Analytics Platform, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications, Partners HealthCare promoted a philosophy of expanded access to the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to increase adoption and self-service analytics to improve patient care and outcomes.
Partners needed widespread adoption of the EDW so that information could be meaningfully incorporated into strategic, clinical and operational decision making to support patient care. This meant that users who had a legitimate need to access data to support their job function were encouraged to seek access to the EDW. The organization continues to focus on further increasing the effectiveness of this strategy by ensuring that users have the means to acquire the skills, knowledge, and support they need to effectively use data stored in the EDW.
Results:

243 percent increase in user base—achieved over a two-year period (700+ unique users).
More data available to a broader audience than ever before.
Physician time to access data reduced from weeks to clicks.
87 percent of user community satisfied with the effectiveness of communication provided to support their use of the EDW.

Mixed reviews of the effectiveness of pay-for-performance programs leave hospitals wondering how to affect meaningful change in patient care and outcomes. However, MultiCare’s experience with focused improvement efforts supported by analytics for pneumonia, sepsis, and women’s care showed that better data consistently leads to better patient outcomes.
Committed to improving population health, and informed by their experience as well as national trends and outcomes, MultiCare formed a new partnership with Health Catalyst, a next-generation data, analytics, and decision support company. The shared risk partnership generated an improvement framework and governance structure formed around a Shared Governance Committee which is responsible for prioritizing, resourcing, and aligning improvement initiatives across MultiCare. The committee and the projects it ultimately approves are informed by data-driven opportunity analysis and ongoing analytics support. This partnership and structure have achieved the following:
Results

Strategic alignment of outcomes goals across the organization.
Established an Analytics Center of Excellence.
Integrated financial data into outcomes improvement initiatives.

Effective data integration enables high value through more strategic, data-driven decision-making, while faster data acquisition feeds and speeds up the process. Orlando Health, one of Florida’s most comprehensive private, not-for-profit healthcare networks, recognized the need for effective data integration to successfully manage to the organization’s changing business needs. The health system needed the ability to rapidly acquire and link disparate healthcare data sources in various ways in order to answer clinical and business questions.
Leaders at Orlando Health needed a data warehouse that better met their needs. They determined that switching from an early binding data process to a late-binding process would provide greater flexibility and expand their access to critical data, with shorter data acquisition times.
With the new EDW, Orlando Health achieved the following efficiencies:

245 fewer days and 1.0 less full time employee (FTE) needed to integrate encounter billing summary system data.
56 fewer days and 0.4 less FTE needed to integrate Infection control system data.
99 percent reduction (90 days saved) in the amount of time needed to implement system enhancements.
98 percent reduction in the work hours needed to incorporate system enhancements.

Admitting a patient to inpatient care is a complex process that, unless carefully managed, can lead to long delays in service and a poor patient experience.
Thibodaux Regional Medical Center’s consistent focus on patient satisfaction has earned the 185-bed community hospital, located one hour southwest of New Orleans, the Healthgrades® Outstanding Patient Experience Award™ every year since 1998. Not surprisingly, when Thibodaux leadership recently analyzed the hospital’s inpatient admit process, they did so from their patients’ point of view and determined to cut admission wait times. Using focused process improvement methodologies, areas of waste were uncovered, exposing problems such as redundant data collection, and inconsistent processes, which would require innovative solutions.
Integrating concepts from the Health Catalyst improvement methodology into its own Lean Six Sigma processes, and with the support of professional services from Health Catalyst, Thibodaux deployed a systematic set of solutions to significantly improve the admission process.
Thibodaux’s efforts are driving measurable improvements in the hospital’s inpatient admission process, including:

55 percent reduction in average inpatient admission time
Ranked 99th percentile for patient experience

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).

As consumers pay more for their healthcare they are demanding more transparency. In a telling example, it’s estimated that over 84 percent of patients use online provider reviews to help make care decisions. With increased transparency, hospitals need to develop strategies to address patient satisfaction while finding a way to participate for more fully in the patient satisfaction dialogue and social media communications, including the rating process.
One large hospital has done just that by increasing transparency in the patient review process. A key component is providing physician star ratings by patients on the hospital’s own website, with patient survey data sourced from Health Catalyst’s analytics platform. While this strategy took time and effort to win over physician acceptance, it has paid off considerably by taking patient satisfaction to new heights.
The overall patient satisfaction improvement initiative, of which the physician transparency effort was a key component, has proven to be resoundingly successful in supporting physicians and staff in the difficult work of providing outstanding and compassionate care – and has reaped impressive results including,

Improved patient satisfaction scores from 60 percent to over 90 percent
Successfully implemented a physician mitigation strategy with a 98 percent comment acceptance rate
Intensified focus on the patient experience through data and education

When healthcare information systems don’t talk to each other, countless inefficiencies and patient safety issues may arise.
Community Health Network (CHNw) believes in delivering outstanding care to every patient. In order to minimize patient safety risks and inefficiencies resulting from using different EHRs, CHNw embarked on a journey to integrate its healthcare information technologies. After implementing a Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse from Health Catalyst that integrates all key data sources, CHNw now has a consistent and comprehensive perspective for multiple patient encounters across the enterprise. It has achieved the following results:

Data from multiple EHR vendors, including four inpatient EHRs and two ambulatory EHRs, plus five transactional systems—HR, patient experience, patient safety, finance, and supply chain— were integrated within 12 months.

More than 55,000 data elements and over 18 billion rows of data were incorporated.

Patient-to-patient matching was implemented for over one million patients across the four inpatient EHRs. This is vital for managing patient populations.

Operational efficiency was improved by 70 percent, with data architects spending an estimated 15 percent of time supporting interfaces compared to an estimated 40-50 percent before the integration. In one example, CHNw linked its ERP/costing system to the EDW’s EHR source marts with just a single interface; previously, this would have required building separate interfaces for all six EHRs.

Serving patients with special needs, such as traumatic injury or multiple high acuity co-morbidities, is a costly and complex endeavor. Allina Health’s Transitional Rehabilitation Program (TRP) tackled both of these realities head-on—resulting in cost savings while helping this vulnerable patient population achieve a higher quality of life.
Recognizing the need for high-quality data that could prove the TRP’s value to its patients and community, Allina implemented analytics that enabled it to track and report outcomes and costs, demonstrate value, and generate savings for the health system and the community.
The initiative has reaped wide-ranging results in patient improvements and cost savings including saving health systems and communities $3.2 million over a one-year period, 20 percent greater success than traditional skilled nursing facilities in discharging patients to home and community, 20 percent improvement in impairment in brain injury patients (MPAI-4), and 84 percent improvement in spinal cord independence measure (SCIM).

Improving clinical outcomes is good for patients and good for health systems. In fact, Allina Health’s focus on data-driven outcomes improvement realized a total financial improvement of $125 million in a single year.
Allina embraced the mandate of achieving the Triple Aim: improving the quality and cost of care, as well as the patient experience. To achieve this goal, Allina’s leaders recognized that they would need to realign their strategies, organizational structures, and management practices. Confident that data would help the health system improve the quality of patient care and reduce costs, they implemented a data-driven performance improvement strategy.
The results are astounding. This strategy has achieved financial improvements for the health system of $100+ million per year, four years running, while also advancing Allina Health’s Triple Aim goals of improved clinical outcomes and a better patient experience through dozens of improvement initiatives.

MultiCare, an integrated delivery system (IDS) in the Pacific Northwest, has established a Clinically Integrated Network (CIN) to serve as a model for value creation that benefits patients, providers, and payers. However, to create a truly integrated network, MultiCare needed to build a system of collaboratives—multidisciplinary, clinically focused teams charged with developing clinical care standards and pathways and then collaborating with operations to get them implemented across the enterprise—to improve outcomes in a growing range of clinical domains including Critical Care, Women’s, Surgery, Medicine, Cardiac, and Pediatric. The outcomes of this collaborative care include a 65 percent reduction in sepsis mortality rate, a 75 percent reduction in time required to approve system-wide care guidelines, and a significant contribution to a system-wide cost savings trajectory of more than $100 million over the last three years.

In a healthcare industry transitioning to value-based reimbursement and population health management (PHM), matching patients accurately to their care events across multiple sites of care and sources of information is becoming ever more important. Being able to accurately track utilization of services for a particular patient, patient population, or provider is fundamental to the strategies underlying effective population health management. Partners HealthCare developed an effective patient matching solution for more than 10.5 million patients achieving a 20 percent improvement in patient matching accuracy and a 96-99 percent high-risk patient matching rate. This has allowed the organization to accurately “flag” high risk patient populations and better manage risk under risk-based contracts.

As the healthcare industry rapidly evolves, implementing an enterprise data warehouse has become essential both for population health management and economic survival. While this requires building analytics competency across the enterprise, once adopted, the benefits are abundant—from improved patient outcomes to reduced waste and costs. To rapidly gain value from this platform, healthcare organizations should follow an implementation strategy that, before anything else, identifies the problems analytics is intended to solve. It should also place as much emphasis on people and processes as it does technology. Partners HealthCare is an example of how implementing a data warehouse can quickly leverage analytics across the enterprise to achieve value with high end-user engagement and satisfaction.

Population health management and value-based care has arrived. However, many healthcare organizations don’t have a single source of truth for their data, nor can they easily access their information. In the absence of integrated data visibility, many hospitals are relying on manual workarounds that can take months, and sometimes even years to implement—and in the end, may still fall short of delivering the level of insight needed. Learn how Partners HealthCare consolidated its disparate data warehouses, incorporating more than 27,000 data elements from multiple sources systems—and implemented on time and on budget. Partners’ enterprise data warehouse now serves as the analytics foundation for its overall value strategy.

As healthcare invests in analytics to meet the IHI Triple Aim, data has become its most valuable asset—and one of the most challenging to manage. Healthcare organizations must integrate data from a complex array of internal and external sources. To establish a single source of truth, The University of Kansas Hospital deployed an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). However, they quickly realized that without an effective data governance program clinicians and operational leaders would not trust the data. Led by senior leadership commitment, The University of Kansas Hospital established processes to define data, assign data ownership and identify and resolve data quality issues. They also have 70+ standardized enterprise data definition approvals planned for completion in the first year and have created a multi-year data governance roadmap to ensure a sustained focus on data quality and accessibility.

Effective practice management can help provide quality patient care, increase revenues— and enhance patient and employee satisfaction. Ineffective practice management may cause patients to seek care elsewhere. As the healthcare industry transitions to value-based care, clinics must align provider scheduling as tightly as possible with patient demand while maintaining a high level of physician and patient satisfaction. Learn how practice managers, clinicians and operational executives are improving practice management, patient access and provider productivity, which has contributed to an estimated $20 million in savings.

Improving provider productivity to enhance access to care and positively impact the bottom line is one of the most important tasks facing healthcare organization today. Historically the approach to evaluating provider productivity was complicated, time-consuming and inconsistent. This left providers struggling to effectively manage in their areas of responsibility. Learn how section chiefs, providers and operational leaders at one healthcare organization now have access to near real-time data, a single source of truth, and national benchmarks that enable them to optimize productivity—which resulted in their ability to see more patients and increase revenue per clinical FTE, contributing $20M in organizational savings.

CMS has recently transitioned its Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) program from a pay-for-reporting program to a program that will now apply a negative payment adjustment to providers who do not satisfactorily report data on quality measures. Memorial Hospital faced a significant problem when its PQRS reporting process was hampered by its transition to a new EHR system. They needed a solution. Learn how Memorial successfully used their enterprise data warehouse to submit the necessary data to a certified registry, avoiding a four percent Medicare reimbursement adjustment, and providing them with the potential to earn an incentive payment. They also now have several patient registries that can be used for quality improvement initiatives in clinical care, patient safety, and care coordination.

OSF HealthCare, a pioneer accountable care organization (ACO), was looking to deliver superior clinical outcomes, improve the patient experience, and enhance the affordability and sustainability of its services. OSF’s leaders recognized that to effectively achieve these goals, they needed to reinvent the organization’s performance improvement measurement and reporting system. In addition to deploying new analytics technology, OSF knew they needed to drive a cultural shift throughout the organization to embrace a data-empowered system. By engaging leadership, aligning the initiative with business strategies, and building data-driven clinical and operational improvement teams, OSF was able to save $9-12 million over three years—through both process improvement and cost avoidance. OSF also drove clinical performance improvements in key areas including heart failure and palliative care.

Mission Health in North Carolina has always been dedicated to expanding access to care. To preserve this commitment in an era of declining reimbursement rates, Mission needed better access to data for quick and flexible decision-making. As at most hospitals, operating rooms are Mission’s biggest revenue generator, but they also represent a significant cost center. So, leveraging their new analytics capabilities to drive operational improvements across their system of operating rooms was a strategic opportunity. Mission now has improved ability to drive care and operational improvements with integrated data and analytic tools like their OR Dashboard—resulting in dramatic improvements including a 20% increase in first-case on-time surgical starts.

The need to effectively manage the health of populations is largely driven by the fact that 5 percent of the population accounts for 50 percent of healthcare costs. Being able to identify these patients, provide high-quality care and reduce their utilization is a pressing goal for many of today’s primary care providers (PCPs). Learn how this healthcare organization used a healthcare enterprise data warehouse and analytics to better manage their individual patients and patient population, integrate regulatory and performance reporting, and allow PCPs to spend more time with patients and less time collecting data.

Patient Satisfaction Explorer has enabled Texas Children’s Hospital to trend key performance indicators for patient satisfaction by service unit. Clinicians, executives, and operational leaders can easily drill down into the granular data to analyze patient satisfaction in more detail, including individual survey responses. Their current results include: improved operational efficiencies with integrated data and analytics – which is helping the healthcare system achieve its system-wide initiative to eliminate the use of vendor portals; increased system-side transparency across 3 campuses, 28 survey units and 145 locations with all levels of the organization having full transparency into how their performance is being measured; full empowerment to discover how to improve their patients’ experience, integrated patient satisfaction data into quality improvement initiatives; reduced custom reporting requests by 15%.