The United States population stands at 323 million and has a net gain of one person every 12 seconds. And, as insurance coverage increases, more people than ever before are seeking health care services. Estimates show that 20 million people have gained health coverage because of the Affordable Care Act within the last few years, placing new demands on our healthcare system.
Unfortunately, the number of healthcare professionals is not increasing at the same rate as demand for services. It means we, as physicians, have to be more effective in how we manage our patients.
Analytics is a powerful tool for clinicians to use to navigate the rising tide of patients. We can customize analytics to provider, organization, geography, diagnosis or any number of attributes for a community of patients. Because, when we can key in on patients who are most at risk or who need the most help, we can align our priorities and resources to optimize care for them.
Carolyn Scott, Registered Nurse, M.Ed., Master of Health Administration, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, PeraHealth
Written by: Carolyn Scott
As healthcare transitions from fee-for-service to value-based care, there is an emphasis on lowering costs and improving outcomes. In the midst of this transition, care teams are currently equipped with outdated tools that drive a reactive, “let’s fix it,” mentality. However, reaching these goals requires shifting the way care is delivered by being more proactive and patient-centered. This isn’t a new concept, but it’s something we’ve yet to achieve. How can we make this happen? By combining existing information in electronic health records (EHRs), vital signs, lab results, and nursing data with predictive analytics to help care teams attain this proactive mindset.
Nursing assessments have long been considered a standard nursing practice; however, combining them with the advent of clinical analytics makes them a far more powerful tool. For example, the insights generated by predictive analytics can allow care teams to determine a patient’s risk of a serious health event, with time to proactively intervene earlier. By leveraging analytics, we can transform the way we provide care.
Kevin Fitzpatrick, Chief Executive Officer, CancerLinQ
The field of oncology has been filled with pioneers dedicated to furthering research and science in search of a cure for cancer. Many of those pioneers in medical oncology have been members of the nonprofit American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), including Sidney Farber, MD; Kanti R. Rai, MD; and Janet D. Rowley, MD. These physicians dedicated their lives to improving the quality of care for patients with cancer. This commitment to quality and the quest for knowledge is still alive today in CancerLinQ, a health information technology (HIT) platform that will harness Big Data to deliver high-quality care to patients with cancer that is being compiled by CancerLinQ, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of ASCO.
This rapid learning system for oncology data brings together a network of members of and practitioners in the field of oncology who contribute to the care of cancer patients everywhere and provides users with access to data from potentially millions of cancer patients to help inform decisions about patient care. In effect, CancerLinQ is the evolutionary next step in ASCO’s rich 50-plus-year history of being the world’s leading professional organization for physicians and oncology professionals caring for people with cancer.
Joe Warbington, Director Market Development for Healthcare, Qlik
Emergency departments around the world are under tremendous pressure to reduce patient waiting times and drive clinical effectiveness in all areas. The ED in most hospitals is a fast paced, high pressure environment where no two days are the same and where an increasing demand has led to significant focus on quality and performance. Given this backdrop, data and analytics may not seem like an obvious solution, but the evidence of the impact these programs are having is undeniable.
At the North East Georgia Medical Center, Dr. Mohac Davè, the ED Medical Director has been working with Qlik in their ED for over 2 years, specifically targeting performance, patient experience and patient safety. The ED manages 115,000 patients per year and one of the early findings showed that contrary to popular belief, arrival patterns are actually extremely predictable. “We now know with some certainty that Mondays, especially afternoons and evening, are going to be the highest volume day.” Dr. Davè goes on to say that, “Qlik has allowed us to take this knowledge and provide staffing to demand.”
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Rajeev Kulkarni, Senior Data Scientist, CitiusTech
A data-driven approach to healthcare delivery is the new standard key stakeholders – providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies and more – rely on to control costs while improving outcomes. Digitization of data is making this possible. From clinical and medical claims, electronic medical record (EMR), clinical trials, genomics and IoT data, to structured and unstructured data generated by patients and devices, digitalized data is paving way for evidence-based practice and personalized medicine. Data assets are now becoming new competitive advantages among healthcare organizations.
Apart from traditional retrospective analytics and quality measure reporting, healthcare organizations are now investing in meaningful advanced analytic solutions such as predictive analytics and data mining, which will allow healthcare stakeholders to use digitized information to provide real-time clinical decision support, improve care and control costs.
The five V’s of healthcare data
Today, as healthcare is generating data in huge volume, with diverse variety, velocity and with improved veracity, big data is becoming the default solution to store, aggregate and process health information. The marriage of big data and predictive analytics is what enables the fifth ‘v’ of healthcare data: value.
Joe Warbington, Director Market Development for Healthcare, Qlik
There is no doubt the healthcare industry continues to transform and evolve at a staggering pace. Between the mergers and acquisitions, to the ever-changing regulations, to patient care, one has to wonder how health systems these days keep track of it all and remain profitable, while delivering care patients and society expect to receive. So how do successful health systems do it? How do successful health systems change the internal culture to reflect the various demands patients, stakeholders, and clinicians put on them while also ensuring safety and profitability? The answer, quite simply, is put is to empower decision makers to make data-driven decisions at the point of care rather than days, weeks, or even months down the road.
In order to do this, one must work to change the internal cultural within a health system, to really rally the troops so to speak, and implement a solution that enables stakeholders to create an enterprise-wide, sustainable and progressive environment for analytics. Yes, analytics. By applying visual analytics solutions to various departments throughout the health system, one is able to see the wide-range of benefits, including the delivery of enhanced patient care, inventory levels being more accurate, as well as the ability to reduce costs and waste.
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Performance benchmarking provides hospitals with invaluable information to drive quality improvement initiatives: how they compare with similar hospitals across different quality metrics, which mitigation strategies have proven to be most successful among their peers, and how these trends are evolving over time. To get the most benefit from healthcare quality improvement initiatives, hospitals need comparative information that is timely, complete and actionable. State hospital associations may be in the best position to help their members design and implement an analytics system that meets all of these needs.
Power in numbers: Lessons from Ohio Since 2013, the Ohio Hospital Association (OHA) and Battelle have been working together to create a shared analytical platform for Ohio hospitals. The result is Battelle WayFinder QI Dashboard, a cloud-based quality improvement analytics tool that allows hospitals to organize, display and analyze Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and other quality indicators, and benchmark performance among hospital types.
Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to streamline operations and run more efficiently, with the ultimate goal of improving patient care while reducing costs. One way to do this is to ensure every worker has easy access to data analytics from health records systems and information portals – and that they actually use that information to make decisions. However, the latter part has proven to be trickier than expected for many organizations.
The analytics adoption problem is something that affects organizations across all industries, and it is only getting compounded as organizations require their employees to be more data-driven. In Logi’s 2015 State of Self-Service Analytics Report we found the analytics adoption rate of business users was 22 percent, even though users in most organizations have plenty of analytics tools on hand.
After taking a step back and looking at the issue, many organizations have quickly realized that the reason many analytics tools result in poor user adoption is the over-generalization of those tools.
Analytics is not one-size-fits-all: In any healthcare setting, different users will need to utilize data in vastly different ways. At a hospital, nurses on the floor need to quickly access high-level, comprehensive patient data on the go. On the other hand, hospital administrators may prefer to dive deep into detailed efficiencies dashboards on their desktops.
If healthcare organizations want to ensure user adoption of analytics tools, it’s essential that the capabilities be tailored to individual users’ roles and skills.
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For the second year in a row, the annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey, designed to highlight industry trends and pain points, revealed that data analytics tops the list of challenges for health IT professionals (chief information officers, chief medical information officers, IT directors and consultants.) In fact, thirty-three percent of respondents identified data analytics and business intelligence as the hottest topic for 2016.
These results reflect that healthcare leaders are now recognizing the value in effective use of statistical data and trends to improve financial performance and patient outcomes. In addition, results show that they are influenced by enhanced data visualization capabilities advancing over the past few years. With greater ease in end-user understanding and proactive interpretation, actionable data insights tie into the success of population health management and value-based care initiatives promoted across the healthcare industry. Additionally, more accessible data, that is both reliable and comprehensive, allows providers to have timely evidence to support decisions for safer care.
Below is an overview of specific data challenges and implications revealed by the survey and suggestions for how they can be addressed.
Joe Guerriero, Senior Vice President of MDGuidelines, Reed Group
(Editor’s Note: This article is part three of a three part series. Part one is published here. Part two is published here.)
It’s the healthcare industry’s turn to embrace what other industries have known for years: The consumer experience is king. According to a recent study from The Beryl Institute, a large majority – nearly 90 percent – of global healthcare consumers reported that patient experience is extremely important to them.[i] And for the first time, as reported in March 2016 in another recent study, the link between higher patient experience ratings and better outcomes has been demonstrated.[ii] For example, a higher patient experience had a statistically significant association with lower rates of unplanned readmissions to the hospital within 30 days.
Healthcare executives are responding by shifting their focus as well. According to a survey of C-level executives from The Advisory Board Company, two of the four most commonly cited concerns relate to patients’ non-clinical needs, specifically meeting consumer expectations (47 percent) and patient engagement strategies (45 percent).[iii] The correlation between experience, engagement and outcomes is communication and control. When patients aren’t actively involved in their own care, it can prolong recovery times, drive up costs and diminish satisfaction.
