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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.
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.
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.
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”:
Bad Data is duplicated, outdated, incorrect, or incomplete information that resides in multiple IT systems across a company’s data center.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.
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.
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!
Pursuit Healthcare Advisors, LLC (Pursuit) is pleased to announce a new partnership with Polaris Strategic Solutions, Inc. (Polaris) whose services and toolkit will complement Pursuit’s own solutions. Polaris was founded with the goal of eliminating obstacles which prevent many hospitals and health systems from implementing a true enterprise-wide reporting and analytics system. Their innovative approach combines accessing an organization’s data across multiple vendor software platforms with aggregating that data into custom reports which are flexible, dynamic, and responsive on-demand.
The Polaris Strategic Solutions team is delighted to congratulate our valued client Berkshire Medical Center (BMC) for recently being ranked #1 in the nation for its composite measure of PSI-90 Patient Safety Indicators.
Selecting the right healthcare analytics partner is indeed a challenge for hospitals and health systems. Faced with a growing demand for analytics and declining budgets, it’s difficult to find a workable solution that meets the organization’s needs and generates a reasonable ROI.
