How Context Transforms Raw Healthcare Data into Actionable Business Intelligence

Hospitals that generate information from their various systems and obtain it from third parties (e.g. post-acute care organizations), must recognize that data on its own has no context. It is raw material that can lead to faster and smarter decisions. But this only happens when hospitals know what questions to ask of the massive amount of data in their ecosystem — i.e. when they supply the right context — so that information can translate into intelligence.

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Hospitals: How to Stop Getting “Dinged” by Enterprise Reporting Consultants

As consumers, we all have experienced the frustration of getting financially “dinged” by various businesses. For example, banks and wireless companies are notorious for tacking on nebulous service charges. And since we do not want to send blood pressure levels surging, we will not explore the wild and weird world of airline carrier fees. Yet, as maddening as these surprise costs are, in terms of bottom-line dollar amounts they pale by comparison to what some vendors get away with in the B2B space. And unfortunately for hospitals, enterprise reporting consultants can be among the biggest culprits.

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Lessons from MacGyver: Bent Paper Clips and Chocolate Do Not Solve Healthcare Reporting Problems

Shining a spotlight on MacGyver is not just an opportunity to take a sentimental journey down memory lane. It is to point out — with jarring, blatant, cheesy, in-your-face 1980’s-style bigness — that ordinary mortals need legitimate tools to achieve their professional objectives. Unless one is MacGyver, bent paper clips and chocolate do not get the job done.

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Polaris Strategic Solutions Launches Partnership with Innovative Consulting Group

MALVERN, PA — September 25, 2018 — Healthcare reporting firm Polaris Strategic Solutions announced today that it has entered into a sales partnership with healthcare IT consulting firm Innovative Consulting Group (ICG).

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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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