The Best Healthcare Analytics Application for Prioritizing Improvement Programs

Prioritizing Improvement Programs
© 2014 Health Catalyst
www.healthcatalyst.com
Healthcare organizations
are looking to analytics
applications that will help
them identify and prioritize
the projects most likely to
improve care delivery in
ways that deliver the best
return on investment (ROI).
Proprietary. Feel free to share but we would appreciate a Health Catalyst citation.

The Need for Sophisticated Analytics
An in-depth look at my sepsis journey
A recent hospital stay put me in
a different role — that of sepsis
patient — which makes me
adamant about seeing
hospitals select the right tools.
Clinicians must have the right
analytics solutions at their
fingertips, so they can use the
information to reduce life-threatening
and costly incidents

An in-depth look at my sepsis journey
A routine cortisone injection in
my knee turned into an
infection that required follow-up
care in every area of
healthcare, including physician
offices, a hospital, a skilled
nursing facility, and many
sessions of physical therapy.

Personal costs of sepsis
Identifying sepsis infection and
treatment effectiveness is
difficult, especially when they
don’t have analytics tools to
actively sift through the data to
measure their interventions.
It’s likely that chronic pain as a
result of the multiple surgeries
could have been prevented had
sepsis been diagnosed earlier.

National costs of sepsis
The 2011 Healthcare Cost and
Utilization Project (HCUP)
report identifies sepsis as the
most expensive condition,
costing hospitals $20.3 billion in
2011 alone. CMS is trying to
contain costs by withholding
reimbursement where providers
don’t reduce high rates of
hospital–acquired conditions,
including sepsis.

Eliminating the Guesswork
The huge quantity of data a
health system has stored is
an asset in terms of mining
the data for insights.
It also makes it difficult to
know where to start when
looking for an improvement
project. That’s why it helps
to eliminate the guesswork
in addressing this question.

Keys to Identifying Improvement
Projects with the Best ROI
To identify areas with the greatest
opportunity for improvement in both
cost and quality, we recommend
the following:
The first step is to establish a healthcare
enterprise data warehouse (EDW).
1
With an EDW there is a foundation for
sophisticated analytics solutions.
2

Using Key Process Analysis (KPA)
to Identify Improvement Projects
The Key Process Analysis application
uses the Pareto principle (“80/20 rule”)
to find areas with highest variation and
highest resource consumption.
80%
20%

How Does the KPA Application Work?
The KPA Application combines
clinical, billing, and costing data and
enables users to analyze the data
with easy-to-understand dashboards.
Based on ICD-9 codes, the tool sorts
each patient encounter into a three-tiered
hierarchy:
Clinical 1 program (e.g., orthopedics)
2 Clinical family (e.g., joint)
3 Clinical work process (e.g., hips or knees)

How Does the KPA Application Work?
With clinical data stratified
and combined with financial
data, users can see which
clinical programs, clinical
families, and clinical work
processes offer the greatest
opportunity for improvement.
Figure 1: Example of a Pareto chart generated
in the Health Catalyst KPA Application
Figure 1 shows that 10 clinical families account for 53% of
direct variable cost. Variation in direct variable cost is an
ideal indicator of variation in quality of care.

How the KPA Application Enables Buy-In from Clinical Teams
Sometimes variation is
caused by differences in
documentation practices.
Other times, physicians and
nurses are actually delivering
care in different ways for the
same type of patient and
condition.
Figure 3: KPA Application visualization showing
the cost variation for a specific APR-DRG by
severity level.
Figure 3 displays the cost variation for a specific APR-DRG
by severity level. Each bubble represents a physician, and
the bubble size is the case count. If we focus on just the
physician bubbles, we can see there is wide variation.

Choosing the best analytics application
is critical for transformation
The move to value-based
purchasing is a major change
to the way healthcare
organizations do business.
Having the right tools can
make all the difference in the
healthcare industry’s need to
improve the delivery of care.

Choosing the best analytics application
is critical for transformation
An EDW serves as a critical
foundation and enables users
to run sophisticated analytics
applications. With these
applications, users are able to
make sense of the data and
discover the best areas to
make changes.

Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
The Best Healthcare Analytics Application for Prioritizing
Improvement Programs
More about this topic
3 Steps to Prioritize Clinical Quality Improvement in Healthcare
Bobbi Brown, VP of Financial Engagement
How to Drive ROI in Your Healthcare Improvement Projects (Executive Report)
How Analytics Will Lower Waste and Reduce Costs for the Healthcare Industry
Linking Clinical and Financial Data: The Key to Real Quality and Cost Outcomes
Five Ways for Improving Hospital Revenue Cycle Management

– John Haughom, MD, Senior Advisor, Health Catalyst
For more information:
Download Healthcare: A Better Way.
The New Era of Opportunity
“This is a knowledge source for clinical and
operational leaders, as well as front-line
caregivers, who are involved in improving
processes, reducing harm, designing and
implementing new care delivery models, and
undertaking the difficult task of leading
meaningful change on behalf of the patients
they serve.”

Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Bobbi Brown is Vice President of Financial Engagement for Health Catalyst, a data
warehousing and analytics company based in Salt Lake City. Ms. Brown started her
healthcare career at Intermountain Healthcare supporting clinical integration efforts
before moving to Sutter Health and, later, Kaiser Permanente, where she served as
Vice President of Financial Planning and Performance. Ms. Brown holds an MBA from
the Thunderbird School of Global Management as well as a BA in Spanish and
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Education from Misericordia University. She regularly writes and teaches on finance-related
healthcare topics.

The Best Healthcare Analytics Application for Prioritizing Improvement Programs

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The Best Healthcare Analytics Application for Prioritizing Improvement Programs