Athens Regional Health System uses Business Intelligence from Dimensional Insight to make a strong impact with small BI projects.

1. ©2017 Dimensional Insight, Inc.
Five Ways Small BI Projects
Can Make A Big Difference
Athens Regional Health System
Case Study

2. ©2017 Dimensional Insight, Inc.
Athens Regional Health System
 350-bed regional referral
hospital in northeast
Georgia
 Level II trauma center,
Level III neonatal
intensive care unit, and
four urgent care centers
as well as a physicians’
practice group
 Solution: Diver Platform
Quick Facts

3. ©2017 Dimensional Insight, Inc.
Athens Regional Health System
 Athens Regional Health System is an award-winning
hospital, named one of Healthgrades’ “America’s 100
Best Hospitals” in 2016.
 Athens Regional has been using The Diver Platform
since 2009, and is constantly looking for new ways to
use Diver to enable better decision-making.
 This presentation highlights five small Diver projects
making a big difference at Athens Regional.
Background

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1. Readmissions vs. Returns
 Athens Regional wanted to gain a better understanding of
emergency department readmissions (those people who
came through the emergency department and then
returned to the hospital within 48 hours as an inpatient).
 The readmissions data was limited to only people who were
admitted as inpatients, but Diver’s flexibility allowed Athens
Regional to change the definitions to get the numbers the
emergency department wanted.
 They were also proactive, expanding definitions in
anticipation of the next question that might be asked: when
does the observation patient come back and get
readmitted?

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2. Chest Pain Unit Metrics
Objective Challenge Solution
Athens Regional Health System
was accredited as a chest pain
center in 2013.
The chest pain unit needed to
take steps to define what they
meant by a low risk acute
coronary syndrome patient.
Diver was able to join all of the
data correctly and produce the
upload file and metrics the chest
pain unit needed.
When the chest pain unit
wanted to reach the next level of
accreditation with the Society of
Cardiovascular Patient Care
(SCPC), the hospital used Diver
to help get there.
They needed to provide a file to
submit data to the SCPC once a
month.
This, despite the fact that all of
the data the chest pain unit
needed was kept in three
different systems, including one
that was a free-text field that
was challenging for searches.
They needed to create a
dashboard to show that the unit
was looking at trends in care
and that they were following
certain guidelines.
The result: the chest pain unit
rose to the top tier of
accreditation without hours of
manual data entry, and it was
able to analyze trends and cut
the length of stay in half for the
observation patients

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3. Lab Turnaround Times
 Athens Regional wanted to
decrease the amount of time
required for the lab to produce
troponin test turnaround
reports.
 ProDiver helped the hospital go
from a time-consuming process
to delivering the data more
quickly.
 This allowed the hospital to:
 Look at which units got results back
quickest
 Identify which units took longest
and investigate why

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4. Quick and Easy File Creation
 Athens Regional Health System frequently uses the file
creation aspect of Diver.
 In one example, the materials department wanted a
freight report in which the goals were:
– To capture all of the freight associated with the hospital’s
purchase orders
– To create a file to send to an outsourcing vendor
 The hospital used Integrator, Dimensional Insight’s ETL
tool, to find the records to include in the file, and then
used a trace object to send the files off.

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5. Workload Graphs
 Athens Regional used Diver to
help figure out how to reduce
labor expense, particularly in the
lab.
 The hospital used ProDiver to
look at when and how much
work was being done with lab
samples, and used that
information to produce graphics
showing peak work times, which
they used to structure the lab
schedule.

9. ©2017 Dimensional Insight, Inc.
Learn More
To learn more, including
how Athens Regional Health
System plans to use Diver
next, visit:
http://www.dimins.com/case
-studies/athens-regional-
case-study/