More and more healthcare providers are investing in data analytics for research, to gain insight into their business and clinical operations and improve patient care and population health efforts. South Dakota-based Sanford Health, a 44-hospital, 291-clinic health system, has centralized its data by building a virtual data warehouse and developed standard definitions for healthcare terms as it ramps up efforts to make data from different business and clinical applications usable for analysis. The health system is building algorithms that will allow it to predict patient behaviour and outcomes, such as potential appointment skipping, and deploying prescriptive analytics to provide recommended actions, such as best practices for convincing patients to show up for appointments. Colorado-based Catholic Health Initiatives is also using analytics to improve patient outcomes, including reduced mortality rates and post-surgery complications. CHI provides executives and hospital leaders monthly reports that track 23 metrics for quality of care, patient safety and patient engagement. They receive a score for each metric and their results are measured against national benchmarks, with the goal of getting to the 75th percentile for quality, safety and patient experience measures. The efforts have worked, with heart failure mortality at its hospitals falling 24% and post-operation complications, such as hip fractures, decreasing 79%.
NBHC Care Experience