Data-Driven Approach Improves Evidence-Based Trauma Care

Mission Health trauma services provide evidence-based care. Despite its efforts to measure the impact of this care on outcomes, the overwhelming burden of manual data review limited its ability to effectively monitor key process measures in a timely manner. This prompted Mission to use data and analytics for timely insights into injury-specific process measure performance and concurrent chart review to improve trauma care.

Actionable Analytics Enables Improved Care, Reduced LOS, and Costs in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

To provide high-quality, cost-effective care to patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), Mission Health needed insight into individual patient and provider performance data. Without access to accurate data, Mission couldn’t accurately pinpoint patient outliers, understand causes of TBI, and identify opportunities to improve TBI patient care. By utilizing its data platform and analytics accelerators, Mission was able to utilize patient data to identify patients suffering from TBI.

Trauma Program Analytics Improves Emergency Department Throughput

To leverage data from its trauma registry database to improve patient outcomes, Mission Health utilized its data platform and analytics, providing real-time access to data and a more comprehensive understanding of each trauma case. With an analytics-driven approach, Mission reduced emergency department (ED) length of stay (LOS) for patients with Level II trauma activation across its populations.

Weekly News Roundup: August 16, 2019

This week's news roundup is all about healthcare quality measures: how evolving CMS quality measures are moving towards patient-centered care; making alternative payment models truly value based; why the new CMS Primary Care Models have implications for serious illness care; and what changes medical groups want for the CMS Patients Over Paperwork program.

Data-Driven Operations Improve ED Efficiency

Emergency departments (ED) provide care for a staggering 145 million patients a year. Improving throughput times remains a top priority for hospitals as overcrowding and long wait times can lead to potential safety events and dissatisfaction with care. To improve ED throughput, Orlando Regional Medical Center (ORMC) assembled an improvement team to analyze the problem, utilizing data analytics and staff feedback to help identify a series of workflow changes designed to improve ED throughput and improve care delivery.

Improving Data Integrity Leads to Lower Supplies Costs

Annually, U.S. hospital supply chain overspend costs an estimated $25.4 billion, which represents 30 percent of all hospital spending. Utilizing data and analytics, Hawai’i Pacific Health gained a deep understanding of its supply chain processes and data, allowing it to improve and maintain the reliability of this information, leading to meaningful and sustained improvements across the system.

Evolving CMS Quality Measures Move Towards More Patient-Centered Care, Less Burden for Clinicians

With today’s comprehensive Meaningful Measures initiative, CMS has refocused healthcare quality measures on improving patient needs and experiences, reducing regulatory burden on clinicians, and removing barriers to value-based payment. The evolved quality measures center on patient, clinician, and health system needs and strategic goals to truly impact improving care and lowering costs. Meaningful Measures, according to CMS, must meet seven criteria:

1. Are patient-centered and meaningful to patients, clinicians, and providers.
2. Address high-impact measure areas that safeguard public health.
3. Are outcome-based where possible.
4. Minimize the level of burden for providers.
5. Create significant opportunity for improvement.
6. Address measure needs for population-based payment through alternative payment models.
7. Align across programs.

Big-Data and Prescriptive Analytics Decreases Pediatric Sepsis Mortality

Pediatric sepsis remains a key concern for hospitals due to the serious nature of the disease. Early diagnosis and timely care are a top priority, as this significantly improves a patient’s chance of recovery. With the help of big data and prescriptive analytics, Texas Children’s Hospital developed an early alert system and workflow changes to improve its pediatric sepsis care. The hospital’s investment in new processes, decision support, and analytics has substantially improved pediatric sepsis outcomes.

Weekly News Roundup: August 9, 2019

Academic medical centers (AMCs) are a triple threat on the healthcare court with their combined medical center, education, and research sections. With a unique set of resources, AMCs have the ability to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to patient care. However, one of the challenges they still face is effectively utilizing healthcare analytics. In this week's news roundup: How AMCs can leverage three areas of healthcare analytics, boost population health management, and automate artificial intelligence for medical decision making. Plus, why AMCs are adapting new business models.

Why One Attendee Is Traveling From the U.S. Virgin Islands to the 2019 Healthcare Analytics Summit

After two Category 5 hurricanes in one year, the Schneider Regional Medical Center (SRMC) has a unique healthcare improvement journey ahead. Tina Comissiong, legal counsel and chief compliance officer of SRMC, knew she needed to attend the Healthcare Analytics Summit as soon as she learned about the event. SRMC was severely damaged by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, and recovery efforts have been underway ever since. In this article, Comissiong explains why she’s excited to attend this year’s summit and how she will apply what she learns to SRMC’s unique healthcare improvement journey.

Multimodal Pain Management Approach Reduces Opioid Prescriptions After Bariatric Surgery

Chronic knee and back pain associated with morbid obesity increases the risk for opioid dependence among patients undergoing bariatric surgery. Mission Health sought a comprehensive, data-driven, evidence-based approach to reduce opioid prescribing after bariatric surgery, decreasing the risk for misuse and harm. By using comprehensive ERAS protocols with multimodal pain management interventions, Mission realized substantial reductions in opioid use for pain management among patients undergoing bariatric surgery, including a:

Getting to the Wrong Answer Faster with Your Analytics: Shifting to a Better Use of AI in Healthcare

Academic Medical Centers: A Triple Threat Approach to Leveraging Healthcare Analytics

Academic medical centers (AMCs) are a triple threat on the healthcare court with their combined medical center, education, and research sections. With a unique set of resources, AMCs have the ability to take a  comprehensive, holistic approach to patient care. However, one of the challenges they still face is utilizing healthcare analytics effectively within the patient care setting. With the Healthcare Analytics Adoption Model and other data expertise, AMCs can learn how to merge siloed data, while improving operations, and delivering the highest quality of care to each patient.

Weekly News Roundup: August 2, 2019

Data drives healthcare improvement and is an imperative resource for navigating a changing healthcare landscape. But healthcare data is complex, and it can be difficult to leverage. This week's news roundup is all about healthcare data management: Three principles of using data to its full potential; how data ethics is now a strategic business weapon; what you need to know about "dark data"; and, four critical phrases of healthcare data governance.

Closed-Loop Analytics Improves Workflow and Efficiency

For every hour of direct patient care they provide, primary care physicians spend nearly two hours on EMR tasks. Registered nurses also spend a substantial amount of their time, up to 45 percent, in the EMR as part of their regular workflow. Using closed-loop analytics integrated into its EMR and COPD application, UnityPoint Health has automated and improved workflow, gained operational efficiency, and improved staff satisfaction.

Population Health Management: Path to Value

In this presentation, John Moore will briefly walk through the evolution of the PHM market and its increasingly integral tie to VBC and future technology and market trajectories. Highlighted topics will include EHR versus best-of-breed solutions, FHIR and open APIs, and the increasing role of IT-enabled services. Learning Objectives:

• Reframing PHM: Defining PHM as a strategy, not a product.
• Core elements of a technology-enabled PHM strategy.
• Moving organizational economics from fee-for-service to VBC and the role of Medicare Advantage.
• The impact of new interoperability efforts and trends to enable effective PHM strategies.

Healthcare Data Management: Three Principles of Using Data to Its Full Potential

Author Douglas Laney is now tackling the topic of Infonomics: the practice of information economics. In his 2017 book, Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an asset for competitive advantage, Laney provides detailed rationale as well as a thoughtful framework for treating information as a modern-day organization’s most valuable asset. This article walks through how healthcare organizations can leverage data to its full potential using this framework and the three principles of infonomics:

• Measure - How much data does the organization have? What is it worth?
• Manage - What data does the organization have? Where is it stored?
• Monetize - How does the organization use data?

Weekly News Roundup: July 26, 2019

Our focus in this week's news roundup is precision medicine: four trends to make it possible; a precision medicine approach to cognitive disease treatment; how real-world data (RWD) and evidence are becoming more prominent in clinical research; and, does precision medicine have a minority problem?

The Health Catalyst IPO: Continuing Our Mission

On July 25, 2019, our Health Catalyst CEO, Dan Burton, the rest of the executive leadership team, and dozens of fellow team members celebrated the Health Catalyst IPO in New York City. More than 700 team members and their families all over the world joined the celebration during events held locally—from Salt Lake City to Boston to Columbus to Singapore. This was a day long-in-the-making, starting with our prescient co-founders Tom Burton and Steve Barlow in 2008. From those early days onward, Health Catalyst has been a mission-driven company committed to being the catalyst for massive, measurable, data-informed healthcare improvement.

Weekly News Roundup: July 19, 2019

Health systems are facing more pressure than ever to deliver cost savings. As a result, many organizations have turned their attention to cost-per-case as an area for potential financial improvements. In this week's news roundup: how healthcare cost-per-case improvements deliver big bottom-line savings; sepsis treatment costs shoot up $1.5 billion for hospitals over three years; cost-accounting-adoption-slow-decades-now-hyper-speed; and, hospital leaders see clear ROI for supply chain analytics, but most use outdated processes.