Your Partner for Proven Outcomes: 5 Health Systems Realizing Meaningful Data-Driven Improvements

Challenges to healthcare affordability and care access are approaching a critical threshold. McKinsey & Company warns that, at current rates, healthcare expenditure growth could exceed economic growth by up to 5.9 percentage points in 2023, resulting in affordability pressures for end payers, including employers, consumers, and government funders.

Health Catalyst is committed to being a long-term partner to our clients, working together to address systemic issues and the burden of financial strain that threatens clinical, operational, and financial success.

Innovative organizations, such as Carle Health, INTEGRIS Health, Community Health Network, Texas Children’s, and UnityPoint Health, have carved new paths in the healthcare industry by leveraging data and analytics to optimize labor hours, realize cost savings, increase accountability, and improve patient outcomes.

Carle Health Improved OPPE with Automated Chart Reviews

Carle Health sought to improve its process for ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE). Rather than performing burdensome manual chart reviews, Carle Health leveraged our data platform to automate OPPE, generating provider scorecards on demand and ensuring each provider’s performance was reviewed regularly. 

As a result, Carle Health saved 1,700 labor hours in manual data collection, aggregation, and reporting, and added 400 advanced practice providers and two hospitals to the OPPE processes—without adding additional resources.

Carle Health implemented an analytics solution to generate provider scorecards on demand, resulting in 1,700 labor hours saved while adding 400 advanced practice providers and two hospitals to the process with no increase in program costs.

INTEGRIS Health Improved Scalability and Cost Efficiencies

INTEGRIS Health recognized the need for a more efficient, scalable data and analytics platform that would supply high-quality data and analytics to provide its leaders with the insights required for continuous improvement. The organization replaced its homegrown system and implemented the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS) platform and a robust suite of analytics applications. As a result, INTEGRIS Health’s new scalable data and analytics platform can deliver high-quality data and analytics required to understand and continually improve organizational performance, resulting in over $3 million in annual indirect labor cost savings.

INTEGRIS Health replaced its homegrown system and implemented the Health Catalyst Data Operating System platform, resulting in over $3 million in annual indirect labor cost savings.

Community Health Network (CHNw) Improves Clinical Chart Abstraction

CHNw leveraged Health Catalyst’s Tech-Enabled Managed Services (TEMS) to help boost performance while cutting labor costs. As part of this effort, they assessed the value of their registries and optimized registry participation. To decrease the likelihood of opioid misuse in bariatric patients following surgery, TEMS expanded clinical chart abstraction efforts to include more data points and assessed inter-rater reliability.

As a result, CHNw achieved:

• $840,000 decrease in costs for patients.
• 59.5 percent reduction in average milligram morphine equivalents.
• 97 percent clinical chart abstraction inter-rater reliability.
• 55 percent relative improvement in clinical chart abstraction efficiency.
• 15 percent reduction in labor costs for clinical chart abstraction services.

Community Health Network leveraged TEMS for clinical chart abstraction, resulting in a decrease in $840,000 decrease in costs for patients, a reduction in average milligram morphine equivalents, improvements in clinical chart abstraction inter-rater reliability, and clinical chart abstraction efficiency.

Texas Children’s Launched System-wide Performance Improvement Initiatives

To improve financial performance and provide data-driven healthcare performance improvements, we partnered with Texas Children’s, and the organization was able to realize $74 million in operational improvements within 18 months.

Through our partnership, Texas Children’s was able to:

• Enhance strategic decision-making by providing timely access to integrated data and a single source of truth.
• Establish a data-driven, transparent culture where executives and clinicians collaborate to define and approve clinical and operational measures.
• Increase the accountability of leaders, providers, and frontline managers for their clinical and operating performance.
• Deliver in-depth assessments of labor, non-labor, inpatient clinical operations, clinical documentation improvement, and physician practice operations.

Texas Children’s partnered with us to improve financial performance and provide data-driven healthcare performance improvements, resulting in $74 million in operational improvements within 18 months.

UnityPoint Health Improved Population Health Outcomes While Decreasing Cost

For the last ten years, we’ve partnered with UnityPoint Health to develop analytics support that helps create happier, healthier patients while driving success in risk-based contracts. The organization focuses on continuous improvement, engaging clinicians in developing common care pathways, using consistent definitions for quality measures and patient outcomes, and partnering in shared-risk incentives. Through our partnership, UnityPoint is able to use its high-value data and analytics to pinpoint improvement opportunities at the point of care, predict population health and financial trends, and improve patient outcomes while decreasing costs.

Through the use of high-value data and population health analytics, UnityPoint Health was able to see results that included $31 million average annual shared savings, improved post-discharge and ED utilization, and more.

UnityPoint Health leveraged high-value data and analytics to identify improvement opportunities at the point of care, predict population health and financial trends, and improve patient outcomes while decreasing costs. The organization achieved $31 million in average yearly savings and improved post-discharge and ED utilization.

Partnerships Forge a Path to Improved Patient Care and Reduced Healthcare Costs

We are committed to equipping our partners with the ability to make system-wide data-informed decisions that result in proven and improved health outcomes. By guiding them to trusted, integrated data as well as identifying and addressing immediate needs and impactful outcomes, we can help them realize the kind of massive, measurable improvements needed to reach their organizational goals.

While the challenges health systems face today are steep, these five industry-leading healthcare organizations demonstrate how harnessing data and analytics technology to overcome current pressures can result in meaningful, scalable solutions and improved health outcomes.