In the high-pressured world of value-based care, healthcare leadership is more important than ever. Leaders need to make data-driven decisions and respond to the increasing demands of patients while cutting costs. The right tools–ones that support today’s outcome-focused healthcare environment–can help leaders break through the noise to make effective decisions. This article shares three common problems faced by healthcare leadership and how Leading Wisely, an executive decision support tool helps them make informed decisions and guide their organizations forward. Three effective strategies for healthcare leadership include: How to prevent communication breakdown. How to break through measure madness. How to alleviate information overload and siloed reporting.

1. Effective Healthcare Decision Support for Executives:
Three Problems that Leading Wisely Solves

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Healthcare Decision Support for Executives
Effective healthcare leadership is more
important than ever.
In the world of value-based care, strong leaders
are vital to managing the increased demands of
patients and shrinking budgets.
However, trying to make data-driven, informed
strategic decisions can be overwhelming and
frustrating as leaders are often inundated with
information and spend much of the time
dealing with unanticipated problems rather
than managing proactively.

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Healthcare Decision Support for Executives
The right tools–ones that support today’s
high-pressure healthcare environment–can
help leaders break through the noise to
provide effective leadership.
Leading Wisely is an executive healthcare
decision support tool designed for healthcare
executives and hospital leadership that
provides real-time, robust data in order
to help leaders make informed decisions
and guide their organizations forward.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
Healthcare executives face several barriers to
effective leadership: complicated communication,
inefficient or outdated analytics, and information
overload, to name a few.
Three key strategies for addressing these
problems are listed below, along with the ways
that Leading Wisely can help.
1. Prevent Communication Breakdown
2. Break Through Measure Madness
3. Alleviate Information Overload and
Siloed Reporting

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
1. Prevent Communication Breakdown
How do healthcare leaders effectively communicate
organizational goals, adding context and transparency
to how the goals are set, measured, and achieved?
As pressure mounts across all departments and roles
to make improvements and cut costs, it’s important to
increase transparency and communication around
measurements and goal setting.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
1. Prevent Communication Breakdown
It’s one thing to show a simple graph that
shows the organization’s patient satisfaction
scores have increased from 70 percent to 77
percent and the goal is 78 percent.
It’s another thing to be able to add content
and context around that goal, showing which
departments did exceptionally well in order
to both celebrate those successes and learn
what those teams are doing in order to share
the information with other departments.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
1. Prevent Communication Breakdown
Leading Wisely provides greater visibility into key
measures and goals and helps prevent communication
breakdown that often happens from the time a goal is
set to when it is achieved (or when it falls short).
System-level goals are not always relevant to
department goals, so leaders can help set realistic
goals for each department.
Those goals can be discussed, and context can be
added to help keep leadership informed as they roll
up to the system initiatives. Often, variability will be
identified from goal-setting and opportunities can be
addressed before they become a problem.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
2. Break Through Measure Madness
How do healthcare leaders make proactive
decisions rather than spending their time
reacting to unanticipated problems?
Healthcare organizations are inundated by
measures from both internal and external
sources. Oftentimes, the data needed for these
is measures is stagnant, outdated, or lacking.
Leading Wisely leverages the Health Catalyst
Data Operating System (DOS™) which works
in real-time to combine and analyze data from
disparate sources of data and offers automated
internal and external reporting.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
2. Break Through Measure Madness
Through strategic consulting services, Health
Catalyst helps leaders drill into what matters
most to the organization.
Leading Wisely helps users filter through
thousands of available measures to find,
track, and share the most relevant measures
or those measures that will have the biggest
impact on performance.
Leaders can select the balance measures
that fit their objectives, set upper and lower
control limits, and configure notifications
when data changes.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
2. Break Through Measure Madness
They can also set system targets and goals,
forecast issues (such as capacity issues), and set
notifications based on severity level to notify the
right person in the organization, allowing for
proactive solutions instead of reactive responses.
When initiatives change or interventions are
completed, it’s easy to track those changes
and visualize impact.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
3. Alleviate Information Overload and Siloed Reporting
How does a CFO find the information that’s important to
her out of a lengthy, canned report intended for multiple
users? How can leaders easily access and share
important information across multiple facilities?
Executives are drowning in information. They are
overrun with reports from multiple sources, geared
towards various audiences, often with data conflicts.
Canned and static reports serve multiple functions
for different users with separate goals. Multiple
facilities can lead to problematic siloed reporting,
lack of communication, and discrepancies.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
3. Alleviate Information Overload and Siloed Reporting
Leading Wisely allows customization to create uniquely
tailored reports for individual users.
Health Catalyst works with the healthcare organization’s
leadership team to take an inventory of all the reports,
find out who is using what reports, and determine
how to make those reports more powerful for
the organization through customization.
Variation resulting from multiple sources is
reduced, unnecessary reports are eliminated,
and customized reporting functionality is
integrated and robust.

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Three Strategies for Effective Healthcare Leadership
Leading Wisely provides effective decision support
in an information-rich world that enables healthcare
leaders to plan, strategize, and communicate by
turning data in actionable information.
Team members can keep leaders informed about
goals through improved communication, easily
find the measures important to them through
robust, customized reporting, and easily access
and share important information.
Leading Wisely enables transparency of
key initiatives and important measures,
increasing accountability and helping
make decisions easier.

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For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

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Effective Healthcare Decision Support for Executives: Three Problems that Leading Wisely Solves
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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Dorian joined Health Catalyst in July 2013. Prior to coming to Health Catalyst, Dorian
worked for PeaceHealth as a Senior Data Warehouse Developer. Dorian has a Bachelor
of Science Degree from Oregon State University and her PMP certification.
Dorian DiNardo