Thibodaux Regional Health System (Thibodaux Regional) recognized opportunities to improve performance and patient outcomes by increasing its focus on care delivery in its ambulatory care settings. By partnering with Health Catalyst professional services and leveraging the Health Catalyst® Data Platform, Thibodaux Regional identified and closed care gaps, optimized workflows, and improved clinical documentation, leading to meaningful ambulatory care improvements and more efficient care delivery. This transformation led to increased revenue, improved payer incentives, and enhanced provider panel utilization, positioning Thibodaux Regional for ongoing growth and success in a competitive healthcare market.
Community hospitals face numerous challenges. Increasingly, commercial insurers are incentivizing patients to travel to larger cities for care, decreasing community hospital volume and revenue, straining abilities to provide care and maintain high-margin service lines.1 Thibodaux Regional faced similar pressures and needed to take action to remain competitive while continuing to deliver high-quality, community-based care.
Like many community hospitals, Thibodaux Regional faced a challenge. To ensure ongoing financial viability, the organization needed to extend its culture of excellence from the hospital to its growing network of ambulatory clinics.
Thibodaux Regional recognized it likely had missed opportunities in annual wellness visits and care gap closure, leading to lost revenue and lower payer incentives. Still, obtaining performance data from its EHR was challenging, and data were often incomplete, limiting its ability to improve.
Thibodaux Regional needed a solution to help providers and clinics adopt new workflows that drive ambulatory care improvements and support the delivery of excellent care.
Thibodaux Regional partnered with Health Catalyst professional services, using data and insights from the Health Catalyst® Data Platform, to engage its team members to transform ambulatory care performance, increase the number of patients receiving needed primary and preventative care, and improve payer incentive performance.
The organization assembled an interdisciplinary team of technical, operational, and clinical leaders to drive data-informed improvements. The interdisciplinary team used the Panel Management analytics accelerator, part of the Ambulatory Suite, to conduct a gap analysis and identify workflow and documentation improvement opportunities. The analytics accelerator integrated disparate data sources, including data from EHRs outside of its organization and claims data, providing Thibodaux Regional with a comprehensive assessment and understanding of performance.
Using the analytics accelerator and data platform, Thibodaux Regional identified patients needing an annual wellness visit, patients with primary and preventative care gaps, and opportunities to improve the accuracy and specificity of clinical documentation. Thibodaux Regional was also able to identify the patients that had the most significant impact on payer incentive performance, enabling the organization to maximize care gap closure and the impact of care gap closure on its financial performance.
The organization optimized panel management, increasing the number of available clinic visits and ensuring patients were assigned to a specific primary care provider and care team. Thibodaux Regional used targeted, cost-effective outreach to engage patients in completing an annual wellness visit and addressing care gaps. Thibodaux Regional implemented standard pre-visit planning processes to improve visit effectiveness and care gap closure and standardized clinical documentation and coding practices across primary care, ensuring clinical documentation accurately conveyed each patient’s clinical condition and captured the care provided.
Thibodaux Regional engages its providers in reviewing performance data, illustrating the positive impact on patients when care gaps are closed and the effect of accurate and specific clinical documentation on the organization’s financial performance, demonstrating the numerous positive benefits of their work.
By leveraging advanced analytics and a unified team approach, Thibodaux Regional uncovered hidden opportunities in preventative care and payer incentives, transforming patient engagement and financial performance. Results include:
"We knew success depended on extending excellence into every clinic visit. By leveraging data and analytics and engaging our teams, we improved patient care and financial strength, which allows us to keep providing the high-quality services our community needs."
- Greg Stock, MHA, CEO, Thibodaux Regional Health System
With its scalable, data-driven model and strong provider engagement, Thibodaux Regional is well-positioned to sustain growth and deliver on its mission of high-quality, community-based care in Louisiana’s competitive healthcare market. The organization plans to use technology to improve performance, including streamlining patient intake and continued targeted outreach to engage patients overdue for wellness visits and primary and preventative care.
