Six Ways Health Systems Use Analytics to Improve Patient Safety

With preventable patient harm associated with over 400,000 deaths in the U.S. annually, improving safety is a top priority for healthcare organizations. To reduce risks for hospitalized patients, health systems are using patient safety analytics and trigger-based surveillance tools to better understand and recognize the types of harm occurring at their facilities and intervene as early as possible. Six examples of analytics-driven patient safety success cover improvement in the following areas:

1. Wrong-patient order errors.
2. Blood management.
3. Clostridioides difficile (C. diff).
4. Opioid dependence.
5. Event reporting.
6. Sepsis.

Weekly News Roundup: September 18, 2020

As the coronavirus continues to threaten the financial stability of health systems, there is an urgent imperative to formulate an effective financial response. In this week’s news roundup: inside the trillion dollar quest to bring hospital care to your home; three ways to leverage data for an effective financial response; how hospitals' financial recovery is tied to the health of the economy; and why the pandemic has had dramatically different financial consequences for payers and providers.

An Effective Financial Response to COVID-19: Three Ways to Leverage Data

With COVID-19 presenting unprecedented challenges, health systems are struggling to financially survive. With little data about the novel coronavirus, traditional financial approaches that rely on historical information are not sufficient. However, organizations can get back on the road to financial recovery and well-being by practicing three key strategies centered around data:

1. Prioritize access to real-time data.
2. Understand data at a deeper level.
3. Realize margin and cost by service line.

Leveraging data allows financial healthcare leaders to effectively manage the COVID-19 challenges and prepare their health systems for future obstacles.

Denials Management Analytics Reduces Denials by Nearly $5M

On average, claim denials cost each healthcare provider $5 million every year. This loss of revenue resulting from claim denials is a concern for healthcare providers. Billings Clinic sought to determine the cause of claim denials and realized that it needed an analytics solution that could integrate data from multiple sources. The health system leveraged its data platform and analytics applications to pinpoint the sources of the denials, allowing the organization to implement prevention plans and procedures for recovering the denials. Billings Clinic achieved significant results, including:

Data Visualization Dashboards: Three Ways to Maximize Data

With an unpredictable future due to COVID-19, health systems must leverage data to drive decision making at every organizational level. Data visualization dashboards allow health systems to optimize their data and create a data-driven culture by displaying large, real-time data sets in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Health systems that rely on dashboard reporting maximize their data in three important ways:

1. Time to value. Decision makers do not have time to wait for manually-created reports; dashboards quickly convey information so leaders can make swift decisions.
2. Data democratization. Leveraging a central source of truth, dashboards allow leaders at every level to access the most updated, accurate data.
3. Digestible data. Analysts can configure dashboards to highlight important figures and trends, so high-level leaders can understand complex data without diving into spreadsheets.

Telehealth: A Top Organizational Performance Solution During COVID-19 and Beyond

With COVID-19 sending health systems reeling, leaders understand the only way organizations can survive the pandemic is by driving improvement in three key areas: revenue, cost, and quality. Many traditional healthcare delivery methods, such as in-person visits, are on hold, leaving health system leaders considering how telehealth solutions allow organizations to excel in the new industry normal. Although many health systems see telehealth as a temporary healthcare delivery solution because of COVID-19, it is here to stay. And, if health systems invest in telehealth, they will be more likely to succeed in revenue, cost, and quality, even in a pandemic.

Healthcare Analytics Summit 2020: Day Three Recap

The Healthcare Analytics Summit 20 Virtual (HAS 20 Virtual) concluded three days of online programming on Thursday, September 3, 2020. Though COVID-19 forced this year’s event to take place virtually, the geographic dispersal of attendees and presenters didn’t dampen the depth of insights or level of engagement previous summits are known for. After two days of keynote addresses, breakout presentations, small Braindate gatherings, and project and solution showcase, HAS 20 Virtual maintained its momentum. The conference closed on a powerful note with yet more world-class speakers, groundbreaking innovations, and common theme of the power of analytics and human potential in healthcare’s new normal.

Healthcare Analytics Summit 2020: Day Two Recap

Day two of the Healthcare Analytics Summit 20 Virtual (HAS 20 Virtual) included keynote speakers followed by live Q&As, quizzes to earn points for the HAS game, the Analytics Walkabout, Machine Learning Marketplace, and Digital Innovation Showcase. Attendees enjoyed topical keynote speakers like Amy P. Abernethy, MD, PhD, acting CIO of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who discussed the importance of data in addressing COVID-19; Yonatan Adiri, CEO of Healthy.io, who presented on a smartphone-enabled urine test to improve healthcare accessibility; and Sampson Davis, MD, emergency medicine physician and New York Times best-selling author, who shared how education saved his life.

Virtually Kicking Off the 2020 Healthcare Analytics Summit

For the first time from an online platform, Health Catalyst COO Paul Horstmeier welcomed attendees to the Healthcare Analytics Summit 20 Virtual (HAS 20 Virtual), promised a highly interactive online experience that would maintain the breadth and depth of expertise as well as the spirit of innovation of the conference’s in-person iterations. HAS 20 Virtual will also provide some of the fun and good humor attendees have enjoyed in year’s past–from the Virtual fun run to the friendly competition for the most notable socks–HAS 20 Virtual has moved these activities online. Highlights from Day one of HAS 20 included keynotes from Eric Topol, MD and Ari Robicsek, MD, as well as two breakout session waves.

A Sustainable Healthcare Emergency Management Framework: COVID-19 and Beyond (White Paper)

With an ever-changing understanding of COVID-19 and a continually fluctuating disease impact, health systems can’t rely on a single, rigid plan to guide their response and recovery efforts. An effective solution is likely a flexible framework that steers hospitals and other providers through four critical phases of a communitywide healthcare emergency:

1. Prepare for an outbreak.
2. Prevent transmission.
3. Recover from an outbreak.
4. Plan for the future.

The framework must include data-supported surveillance and containment strategies to enhance detection, reduce transmission, and manage capacity and supplies, providing a roadmap to respond to immediate demands and also support a sustainable long-term pandemic response.

Analytics and Provider Operations Support Generates Nearly $2M in Shared Savings

Acuitas Health was challenged to identify opportunities for shared savings, reducing cost while also improving quality outcomes. Using Acuitas Health’s advanced analytics, providers and payers can now connect, communicate, and share insights that enable the organizations to identify opportunities to decrease costs for all partners, and increase outcomes that yield benefits in several areas, including quality improvement, claims optimization, and risk adjustment.

Employee Engagement During COVID-19: Using Culture to Manage Stress, Maintain Productivity

As organizations confront a post-COVID-19 world, leaders must balance pandemic-driven practices and environments with team member eagerness to and uncertainty towards returning to business as usual. Even though ongoing fear and stress are inevitable, leaders and managers can use a positive workplace culture to support employees, engage their teams, and foster productivity. Safe, reliable access to health and wellness, remote mental health resources, and consistent communications will help organizations establish and maintain a positive culture that remains a steadfast source of support as the healthcare industry navigates the next phases of COVID-19.

Self-Service Data Tools Unlock Healthcare’s Most Valuable Asset

Data is increasingly critical to the delivery of healthcare. However, due to its complexity and scope, frontline clinicians and other end users can’t always access the data they need when they need it. In addition, expectations for data at the point of care unduly burden data analysts, keeping them from advancing more sophisticated organizational analytics goals. In response to data productivity and efficiency challenges, self-service data solutions models only the high-value data, versus all available data, giving analysts and nontechnical users immediate and direct access to the data. These reusable models address three key challenges healthcare analytics programs face:

1. Cost—avoid additional expense and labor of producing single-use models.
2. Efficiency—save times associated with routinely producing new models.
3. Maintenance—allow updates across the organization’s models, versus separate updates.

Weekly News Roundup: August 21, 2020

With a lack of historical population-based information to steer COVID-19 research, pharmaceutical companies are struggling to understand the everchanging virus as they work tirelessly to develop a vaccine in less than one year. In this week's news roundup: the top coronavirus vaccines to watch; how a new COVID-19 data repository can help speed vaccine development; how do we get to an effective COVID-19 vaccine, and when; and more.

A Sustainable Healthcare Emergency Management Framework: COVID-19 and Beyond

With an ever-changing understanding of COVID-19 and a continually fluctuating disease impact, health systems can’t rely on a single, rigid plan to guide their response and recovery efforts. An effective solution is likely a flexible framework that steers hospitals and other providers through four critical phases of a communitywide healthcare emergency:

1. Prepare for an outbreak.
2. Prevent transmission.
3. Recover from an outbreak.
4. Plan for the future.

The framework must include data-supported surveillance and containment strategies to enhance detection, reduce transmission, and manage capacity and supplies, providing a roadmap to respond to immediate demands and also support a sustainable long-term pandemic response.

Using Analytics to Automate Heart Failure Data Aggregation

For each heart failure admission, registered nurses at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust collected data from five different sources, and then filled out a 10-page form for each patient. Information from the forms was then manually entered into the National Institute for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research (NICOR) web portal. This manual process for data collection and reporting was not only time-consuming and resource-intensive—but was also highly susceptible to error. To address these challenges, the organization leveraged the Health Catalyst^® Data Operating System (DOS™) to integrate the data from the five source systems and extract data for nearly all of the elements required for heart failure readmissions—streamlining the NICOR submission process and improving data quality and accuracy.

Analytics Reveal AAA Programme Improvement Success

As part of its efforts to improve the timeliness of care for patients undergoing abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust needed to collect data to guide care redesign, help assess the impact of specific interventions, and gauge progress toward desired outcomes. Guy’s and St Thomas’ implemented the Health Catalyst® Data Operating System (DOS™) platform, including a Referral Pathway analytics application, allowing the organization to aggregate and standardize data across source systems. Improved data and analytics have enabled Guy’s and St Thomas’ to analyze, evaluate, and monitor outcomes for the entire AAA cohort and evaluate operational performance and associated patient outcomes.

Health Catalyst Launches COVID-19 Patient Data Repository to Speed Vaccine Development

With a lack of historical population-based information to steer COVID-19 research, pharmaceutical companies are struggling to understand the everchanging virus as they work tirelessly to develop a vaccine in less than one year. Research teams can access near real-time COVID-19 patient data with Touchstone^® for COVID-19 National Data Sets and Registry from over 80 million patients across the United States and three national data sources: John Hopkins University, The New York Times, and The COVID Tracking Project. The Registry offers up-to-date, comprehensive data with outcome analysis and clinical trial analysis so research teams can stay up to date through every stage of the vaccine development process.

Weekly News Roundup: August 14, 2020

The events of 2020 have already pushed healthcare systems to adapt to many challenges. To prepare for continued changes, health systems need to pay close attention to developing trends. In this week's news roundup: the five healthcare trends to watch during COVID-19; adapting to challenges of COVID-19 with trends in healthcare payments; five digital trends that have accelerated since COVID-19; the role of mobile health technology in the pandemic; and more.

Healthcare Trends During COVID-19: Top Five Areas to Watch

COVID-19 is now a commanding force in healthcare, and outbreak-driven trends will continue to influence the industry and impact patients for the foreseeable future. Understanding and preparing for activity in five critical categories will help health systems navigate the next phases of the COVID-19 era:

1. A potential vaccine—confronting availability and distribution challenges.
2. Virtual care—managing the best interests of patients and providers.
3. Models of care—accommodating changing delivery and long-term needs of COVID-19 patients.
4. Healthcare resource management—planning for and recovering from financial and capacity strain.
5. Data—improving accuracy, availability, and timeliness for pandemic management.