Accelerating Sustainable Emergency Department Process Improvements with Performance Analytics
To support value-based purchasing, performance improvement initiatives require that data be aggregated, harmonized, and analyzed from many perspectives – operational efficiency, cost, clinical practice variation, quality, and patient satisfaction. However, the effective implementation of rapid and continuous operational performance improvement has been elusive due in large part to the complexity of curating disparate data in order to make it fit for purpose. This data curation is necessary in order to understand the cause, effect, and impact various metrics have across domains. The ability to understand the impact of particular measures is key. Dr. Edwards Deming, the leading thinker on quality management, famously said, “Measurement without the opportunity to improve is harassment,” and certainly physicians, already burned out from EMR and regulatory fatigue, don’t need projects without clear benefits.
Performance analytics, which provides access to key operational metrics and analytic capabilities, is a big-data approach to addressing these imperatives. Turning that approach into an improvement strategy requires developing a methodology for using data…