d2i’s Client Success Team proactively monitors performance against established targets and thresholds, alerts our clients of outliers, and makes recommendations for improvement.
Having data locked away in disparate systems doesn’t mean you can fully leverage its potential. But the right analytics combines metrics from across silos to provide performance-improving information.
In an increasingly digitized environment, health care organizations (HCOs) are spending millions on their IT systems, hoping to pull information culled from disparate sources — including electronic health records (EHRs) — under one umbrella. Yet, many data analytics solutions haven’t delivered on their promise of timely, meaningful, and relevant information that can be harnessed to improve emergency and hospital medicine performance.
Why? For starters, EHRs aren’t designed for data analytics or business intelligence (BI), so they come up short every time. HCOs may lack the time, resources, and necessary skills to integrate, harmonize, and enrich their data, so much of its value will remain untapped. To gain real insight into performance improvement, the right data analytics solution can help.
Choose Metrics That Matter to You
Every day you can see articles touting “25 KPIs You Should Be Tracking” or “The Top 10 Metrics to Track Daily.” If you’re using a comprehensive analytics solution, much of the underlying data needed to calculate quality measures is available regardless of regulatory updates. But for improving performance or achieving a specific goal, the strategy must be focused.
Get rid of the noise. It’s more productive to focus on improving one area or a few at a time than it is to track 100 metrics at once. Make sure you’re using a performance analytics solution that allows providers to quickly get answers to their questions surrounding various metrics with minimal mouse clicks. Smart dashboards allow for the quick identification of underperforming metrics, their causal factors, and the impact they have on overarching goals and other metrics.
Goals and Measuring Progress
Data must be aggregated, harmonized, and enriched to give you insight across domains (operational efficiency, cost, clinical practice variation, quality, and patient satisfaction). With rich, multi-domain, normalized data sets, cross-functional teams can paint a comprehensive picture from many perspectives to understand what is happening, why it’s happening, and what actions can be taken.
For example, reducing ALOS requires tracking metrics that impact length of stay and identifying potential causes that are modifiable and actionable. Because provider productivity, delays in ancillary services and inpatient admissions, and nurse staffing have been associated with ALOS, your analytics solution should be able to track arrivals by hour of day, day of week, and acuity to provide insight into how best to optimize provider scheduling and minimize bottlenecks. Similarly, reducing LWBS and AMA requires tracking metrics that impact door-to-doctor time, patient flow, and resource utilization management.
Get User Support
EDs arguably present one of health care’s most dynamic and complex environments to manage. Ongoing data analytics support can ensure that trends are understood, opportunities for improvement are reviewed, and existing or new analytics are leveraged to identify and promote high-impact actions.
Instead of waiting for clients to reach out to us, our Client Success Team proactively monitors client performance. We take the time to get to know what is important to our clients, their practices, and their stakeholders.
We actively work with them, not only to ensure they have the information they need to manage performance, but also to help them achieve their goals. We monitor performance against established targets and thresholds, alert our clients of outliers, and make recommendations for improvement.
This provides an alternative to recruiting and retaining data scientists, who are some of the most coveted — and most expensive — IT resources. Outsourcing analytics can give you access to a higher level of experience in data acquisition and management, as well as the domain specialization in emergency and hospital medicine necessary to effectively interpret the data.
d2i’s user-friendly reports provide detail on a granular level as needed, and enable leadership to take strategic steps to achieve goals. Contact us to learn more about why no other health care analytics tool compares, or request a demo to see our application in action.