The 4 Characteristics of True Healthcare Enterprise-Wide Reporting

While each hospital has a unique culture, vision and community footprint, there is one thing that all hospital executives have in common: on today’s relentlessly fast-paced and constantly-changing healthcare landscape, they are ceaselessly bombarded with messaging about analytics, business intelligence and big data. And to make things even more challenging, executives are also constantly at-risk of being “unable to see the forest for the trees” due to obstacles such as silos that disconnect departments, spreadsheets that do not synchronize, and growing workloads that must be properly handled by fewer people.

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How SVMC’s Award-Winning Transitional Care Nursing Program is Closing the Healthcare Gap

Since 1918, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center (SVMC) has served generations of patients in Vermont, New York and Massachusetts. And throughout its celebrated history, SVMC has successfully adjusted and adapted to numerous changes on the healthcare landscape; everything from shifting demographics and patient populations, to new medical technologies and innovative approaches to care.

However, SVMC recognized that in order to continue fulfilling its promise of providing exceptional, convenient and affordable care, it had to address a crucial challenge that many hospitals across the country are facing with unprecedented intensity and urgency: as care moves from inpatient to outpatient settings and into the community, how must they refocus to meet the increasing need for resources outside hospital walls?

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ACO’s: Why Reporting is the Missing Piece of the Population Health Optimization Puzzle

Population health management is a strategic approach designed to help ACO’s trade higher-cost acute care services for lower-cost care management, prevent patients with multiple risk factors from escalating to the high-cost category, and provide low-risk patients with convenient access to the services that they need most — and all while meeting prevailing clinical care standards, operational best practices, and compliance requirements.

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Hospitals: How to Ensure the Reporting You NEED is the Reporting You GET

Many hospitals are struggling with the fact that their promised “user friendly” analytics tools are neither usable nor friendly. Instead of leveraging clear, updated and actionable reporting, hospitals are constrained by data silos, and forced to choose various “canned” options that are incomplete, slow and limited.

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How to Fill the Growing Patient Data Gap Between Hospitals and Post-Acute Care Organizations

To increase the likelihood that discharged patients will stay on their respective paths to recovery vs. return to the ER or get readmitted, hospitals need to monitor patients through the continuum of care as they engage various post-acute care (PAC) organizations, such as inpatient rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, and so on. Yet in order to achieve this critical objective, hospitals must get timely and accurate information from these external sources — and that is causing a major patient data gap.

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Think Nationally and Focus Locally: Unleashing the Power of Benchmarking to Drive Physician Performance Improvement

Many hospitals invest in national benchmarking to engage physicians in performance improvement, and minimize unwanted or unnecessary deviations in physician practice. However, while the concept of comparing key metrics with similar organizations can be part of the solution, there are some potential problems with this approach that, for some hospitals, is triggering ongoing frustrations instead of driving continuous gains.

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Hospitals & Health Networks: What to Do When Your Report “Garden” Turns into a “Wasteland”

Anyone who has tried their hand at gardening has discovered, usually to their surprise and sometimes to their dismay, that it is not a set-it-and-forget it experience. It is a long-term commitment that requires ongoing attention, because variables constantly change: temperatures, seasons, sunlight, moisture levels, soil quality and, of course, the relentless threat of avowed garden enemies like weeds, insects and dig-happy squirrels. As such, it is up to each gardener — whether they are of the casual or the award-seeking kind — to adjust and adapt to what nature brings their way.

In a similar sense, hospitals and health networks must constantly re-calibrate their reporting function and framework, and ensure that it aligns with changing conditions and current needs. Otherwise, it is only a matter of time before any or all of the following events emerge — or better stated, erupt — and turn their report “garden” into a “wasteland”:

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The Cost of Bad Data

Bad Data is duplicated, outdated, incorrect, or incomplete information that resides in multiple IT systems across a company’s data center. IBM estimated the yearly cost of poor quality data, in the US alone, was $3.1 trillion in 2016. The reason bad data costs so much is that decision makers, managers, knowledge workers and others must accommodate it in their everyday work. And doing so is both time-consuming and expensive. The data they need has plenty of errors, and in the face of a critical deadline, many individuals simply make corrections themselves to complete the task at hand.

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Why are Analytics Tools Driving Healthcare IT Professionals to the Brink?

There’s no shortage of challenges that can keep HCIT professionals awake at night, and stressed-out during the day: HIPAA privacy requirement, inadequate data storage, cyber threats, and skyrocketing IT project costs readily spring to mind. However, there’s one particularly thorny problem area that is arguably responsible for more exhausted “I should have gone to cooking school” sentiments than anything else: having to manage and support a disparate array of analytics tools in the environment.

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Healthcare Analytics Tools: Don’t Underestimate the ROI of Convenience

When evaluating their healthcare analytics tools, hospitals and health networks naturally focus on measuring ROI. However, if this process is exclusively about investment costs, then it is not capturing the full story — because it is not just about money: it is also about convenience.

At first glance, this may seem unusual — or perhaps simply mistaken. After all, how important is convenience when it comes to optimizing healthcare analytics tools and exploiting their full value? Well, if you ask the people who must use such tools on day-to-day basis, the answer is a clear and emphatic: it matters enormously!

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