Interactive dashboards are helping clinicians and staff hone their processes in the OR. As a result, Jefferson Health has increased on-time starts by 25 percent, improved patient satisfaction and realized savings of nearly $300,000 a month.
The tools have also helped the organization reduce the time that patients spend on ventilators in intensive care units, lowering the risk of ventilator-associated pneumonias, Martino says. The healthcare system also uses Qlik Sense on its EHR to aggregate and track opioid orders and provide clinicians with interactive reports to help them control overprescription of the addictive drugs.
“Using analytics, hospitals are finding out who does it best, whatever the procedure or treatment, and making that the standard, improving care across the institution,” Burghard says.
Data Improves Emergency Flow at CHRISTUS Health
Similar to Jefferson Health, Dallas-based CHRISTUS Health turned to analytics to better manage patient care flow. Using a robust analytics setup that included Informatica solutions such as B2B Data Exchange, Data Quality, Master Data Management and Power Exchange, CHRISTUS has reduced average patient stays in its emergency rooms up to 60 percent, says Lauren Bui, vice president for data management and analytics.
“We were able to provide a full view of patient throughput and quality of service,” Bui says. “Through the dashboard, clinicians and administrators not only saw historical data, but also could drill down to individual patients and how they were doing hourly.”
CHRISTUS is still involved in the substantial groundwork necessary to use its analytics tools to their full potential, Bui says. The task is complicated by the fact that CHRISTUS has grown through mergers and acquisitions, bringing together many disparate systems.
To that end, CHRISTUS staff currently spend more time cleansing data than working on data visualizations, she says. “But these steps are essential if you want the analytics to be right in the end,” Bui says. “The view provided by analytics translates into more continuity of care, which is going to mean better care and outcomes for our patients.”
Massachusetts General Taps a More Transparent Culture with Data
At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, data analytics is all about boosting performance, says Andrea Tull, director of reporting and analytics, quality and safety management.