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[...] Balancing adaptability with predictability was a difficult task for Huang, who doesn't have a large in-house analytics team to help him take on the challenge.
"When I started at BMC, there was very little data available about OR scheduling and what we were doing," he recalled. "We had just transitioned to Epic Systems, and we were trying to set up some of the analytics and reporting to understand whether our surgical teams were effectively using the time that was allotted to them."
"Epic has a lot of strengths, but we couldn't get exactly what we needed in this case. I was actually taking the PDF reports we got from Epic, copying and pasting the data into Excel, and re-working the data so we could use it for what we needed."
Using Excel as a fallback wasn't sufficient for this use case, Huang said, even though the ubiquitous data management tool can provide healthcare organizations with some analytics capabilities.
"Hospitals have so much data available these days, but we're still cutting that data with stone tools," he stated. "You can have a great data warehouse, but if you don't have the right applications on top of that to perform meaningful analytics, you're probably going to rely heavily on Excel."
"That's a classic stone tool. You can get the job done with some effort, but it's not very pretty, and you can't really get as deep into the data as you might want to."
Healthcare organizations are in desperate need of better business intelligence, he continued. Without a firm grip on utilization metrics, patient challenges, and available resources, providers will be unable to meet the high-pressure challenges of value-based care.
"Every hospital or health system has to learn to use their data better and understand their patients better so they can intervene to improve outcomes quicker and more effectively, especially if they want to compete in the value-based care market," he stressed.
Small tweaks to a population health management approach, for example, could produce significant returns in patient health as well as spending.
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Source: Health IT Analytics (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on December 8, 2017 06:52 AM
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