Improving the Performance of Health Care Organizations

d2i’s advanced analytics suite helps facilitate performance improvement conversations that drive action and create value.

To stay viable in today’s complex health care landscape, Health Care Organizations (HCOs) must be relentless in their pursuit of excellence through performance and process improvement. d2i’s Performance Analytics Application opens up a whole world of opportunity by enhancing performance to increase productivity, which in turn can help HCOs improve patient flow and clinical outcomes.

Easy-to-interpret analytics simplify the volumes of data and fill knowledge gaps by monitoring financial, quality, operational, and patient satisfaction metrics and modifiable causal factors such as practice variability and staffing while performance improvement initiatives are in progress.

Learn more about how d2i can help your organization stay competitive while providing the highest quality care.

Reducing ED Crowding

When getting to the root cause of emergency department crowding, dashboards alone do not tell the whole story when it comes to identifying bottlenecks and addressing contributing issues. It’s rarely possible to immediately increase your physical capacity and nurse or physician staffing. But, d2i’s Performance Analytics solution allows you to drill deeper into the data to identify specific opportunities to remove bottlenecks and improve processes that optimize existing resources to better handle hard-to-predict patient flow.

Learn more about accurately assessing ED crowding and its causes.

Reducing Practice Variability and Improving Patient Safety

Patient safety is a top priority for every health system, but it can be daunting to know where to focus efforts to best mitigate risk. One way to reduce diagnostic errors is to use data to monitor clinical staff’s protocol compliance to ensure that your best practices are being followed. With d2i’s Performance Analytics solution, quality and physician leaders are able to see how adherence to or variation from established guidelines is affecting clinical errors and outcomes. If errors are still present, d2i’s Performance Analytics solution helps staff identify where adjustments in practice behavior can reduce safety risks and improve clinical outcomes.

Learn more about monitoring protocol compliance to achieve better outcomes and lessen the cost of malpractice insurance.

Reducing Unnecessary Utilization

Unnecessary testing has become a target for insurance denials, and research has shown that overuse of clinical services can create delays in patient care. Furthermore, under many value-based reimbursement models, unnecessary tests directly affect profitability. Unnecessary testing can lead to bottlenecks in ancillary services such as radiology and labs, causing delays for cases that truly require these resources. This results in poor patient flow, which in turn may result in patients leaving without being seen.

The level of detail provided by d2i’s solutions allows cross-functional teams to quickly identify outliers, for example, by ordering clinician, time of day, day of week, or diagnostic subgroups. Through this type of segmentation, your team can develop and implement detailed action plans to change behavior and improve performance.

Learn more about trimming unnecessary costs and preventing claim denials by eliminating waste.

Reducing Average Length of Stay (ALOS)

Reducing ALOS, the amount of time from when a patient arrives to when he or she is discharged, can be challenging. An ED often must handle unexpected volume increases without additional resources. High ALOS can lead to ED crowding, more potential patients who leave without being seen (LWBS), poor resource utilization, reduced patient satisfaction, and potentially adverse clinical outcomes. Reducing ALOS allows the ED to handle more patients with the same resources, which can increase revenue, quality measures, and reputation in the community.

d2i’s Performance Analytics Application tracks the patient journey down to the lowest level of detail, capturing time increments and activity for each patient touch point, service, and movement. This information helps ED leadership identify bottlenecks and take actions to improve patient flow, including dynamic scheduling, adding telehealth, APPs, or mental health resources, and reorganizing the ED to support specific patient groups such as fast track, geriatric, or pediatric patients.

d2i’s Hospital Medicine Performance Analytics can help you realize the added benefit of smoothing transitions from the ED through observation, inpatient status, and hospital discharge. This creates additional opportunities for not only reducing ED ALOS but also inpatient ALOS, along with improvements in overall cost reduction, patient experience, and clinical outcomes.

Learn more about identifying bottlenecks and taking actions to improve patient flow.

Reducing Left Without Being Seen and Against Medical Advice (LWBS and AMA)

Any reduction in LWBS and AMA can have a tremendous impact on performance from many perspectives. When patients leave, not only are direct ED departmental revenues lost ($500 or more per LWBS), but hospital inpatient revenues are as well ($10,000 or more for an admitted LWBS patient). Furthermore, the impact on patient safety and a hospital’s reputation can be equally troubling.

Learn more about making sure patients don’t leave the ED too soon.

Promoting Quality Initiatives

For quality initiatives such as Reduction in Opioids and Reduction in Sepsis, d2i curates detailed operations and clinical activity data and reconstructs the patient timeline, making it easy for leadership to track quality metrics. Armed with comprehensive datasets, d2i allows for the transparent monitoring of physicians and site compliance, helping you identify practice patterns and variations. This allows evidence-based analysis to correlate other factors that may have influenced higher-than-expected cases. When performing these studies, information is easily filtered by any dimension such as diagnostic subgroup, ESI level, or physician, and can be correlated to other metrics to better target areas for improvement.

Learn more about changing opioid prescribing patterns.

Improving Patient Satisfaction

A common complaint regarding patient satisfaction scores from organizations like Press Ganey and NRC Picker is that a few outlier cases –ones that may have little to do with an MD’s overall performance — can have a disproportionate influence on his or her score. These online satisfaction ratings are very important to hospitals from an incentive perspective for CMS programs, as well as for the reputation of hospitals and physicians alike.

HCOs can — and sometimes do — match surveys back to a patient and a specific date of service. But it requires time and resources to build, manage, and maintain, which is why so few do it. d2i’s Performance Analytics solution architecture has built-in logic that matches surveys from these services to actual patients and dates of service, which means it can associate survey results to the clinicians who treated the patient, by diagnostic subgroup, by time of day or shift, by all time increments, and more. We also segment the survey questions and responses to be specific to a clinician.

Because of the depth with which d2i curates data for the visit timeline, we are uniquely able to relate details from a visit survey with all other details, enabling a more productive conversation about what changes are advisable.

Learn more about improving patient satisfaction and performance metrics.

Improving Professional Fee Revenue Cycle in Emergency Medicine

d2i’s acquisition of detailed clinical operational data from the EHR provides enhanced collection opportunities for physician practices, and coding productivity, accuracy, and cost benefits for billing companies.

For physician practices: d2i integrates your detailed EHR clinical and operational data with your billing data, providing analytics that can be used to educate your physicians and billing company on issues that can affect collections. For example, d2i can leverage a patient’s order details to identify when an evaluation and management (E&M) level is inconsistent with tests and labs ordered. By comparing a physician’s E&M codes and actual patient encounter data, d2i can detect variations in practice and service utilization. This allows practice leadership to monitor physician compliance with measures that can enhance or negatively impact cash flow.

For billing companies: Our detailed clinical and operational data — acquired directly from the EHR — can be used to replace current data acquisition methods that are more costly, inconsistent, and error-prone. Our solution organizes EHR data to create prebuilt views of a patient’s visit that detail most of what a coder needs to establish an E&M code, including triage information, patient history, vitals, all orders (i.e., for labs, radiology, procedures, medications, and consults), as well as any abnormal results. And, since all this data is addressable, d2i can add logic to facilitate workflow, coding audits, and other optimization processes.

To learn more about how we can help your organization identify high-impact opportunities and actions for performance improvement, as well as monitor the impact of your changes, contact us to schedule a 30-minute demo.

See why no other health care analytics tool or EHR system comes close.

What d2i does better than any other solution for the ED that I've seen is that it helps us identify the causal factors that explain why the performance issue is happening.

Dr. Peter Viccellio, MD Vice Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine Stony Brook University Hospital October 16, 2017

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