Author: Charleen Harden, Report Analyst
Today’s healthcare market is saturated with hospitals, health systems, and physician practices tackling EHR optimization, cost analytics, and other data-related projects. The industry has made great strides to establish a digital, real-time record of patient care. As that clinical, operational, and financial data piles up, one of the industry’s latest challenges is identifying ways to make that valuable information actionable.
When viewed collectively, data tells a story of what has happened over time. In the healthcare setting, effective data capture helps providers easily assess a myriad of pertinent business metrics, including (but by no means limited to):
How many patients were seen today?
Which patients presented with co-morbidities?
On average, how long was the reimbursement process by payer?
What is the Accounts Receivable impact?
By monitoring business performance, healthcare stakeholders can understand where they stand today relative to past periods and peer organizations. Analysis of that data illuminates areas for improvement and the progress the healthcare organization is making in pursuit of long-term goals. As value-based care initiatives continue to take root, performance reporting also fuels reimbursement under quality payment programs like the Merit-based Incentive Payment System and Meaningful Use.
Hospitals working towards the triple aim of improving population health and patient experience while reducing the cost of care will have to leverage analytics to trend patient outcomes and identify improvement opportunities. With patient health, regulatory compliance, and reimbursement on the line, reporting stakes have never been higher. Amid the proliferation of data-oriented business processes and payment models, reporting expertise and analysts will be among healthcare’s greatest assets.
As your healthcare organization undertakes the complex process of broader clinical and financial reporting, build a successful data management strategy by keeping the following reporting considerations in mind.
Start with your current process.
How are you capturing relevant data now? Analysts should shadow staff members to see what information they are trying to get and how they are presently documenting those details. This can help you identify points in the data capture process that can be improved upon, or are perhaps being overlooked. Help employees understand the “why” behind data capture requirements. Demonstrate how current practices impact the data staff members see in reporting results.
Avoid knowledge gaps by involving reporting stakeholders early on.
In almost every healthcare setting there are gaps in the data being captured. Involve reporting in all implementation initiatives to make sure your organization is consistently capturing the right variables. This is particularly true among clinicians preparing to report on new metrics under MACRA’s inaugural Quality Payment Program period. Set field requirements in your EHR or other healthcare IT platform to ensure the necessary data makes it into the system.
Format reporting data in a manner that highlights actionable insights.
How do you want to see reporting data portrayed? Data may need to be sourced as a dashboard, manipulated in Excel, or sent to a third party, depending on the project at hand. In most use cases, a visual representation of data can help administrators more easily:
- Compare performance data to other hospitals.
- Track metric performance over time.
- Visualize outliers, high-performance areas, and low-performance areas.
Armed with that insight, stakeholders can quickly identify downward trending financial KPIs, clinical quality measures that best support the organizations value-based reporting endeavors, and more.
Develop a data governance strategy.
Avoid common data quality “gotchas” by developing a data governance plan that cultivates consistency in how data is documented. Implement EHR rules that bar duplicate data entry and support field normalization. Establish a data source hierarchy to defer to the highest quality data source in cases where fields may come from multiple sources.
End-users often have not considered the impact that data documentation has on the reporting perspective. Data quality issues revealed during reporting often drive process or policy changes and can shed light on training opportunities. Reporting is a data mining process that supports more effective decision making on behalf of the organization. With reporting and analytics poised to play an expanding role in healthcare initiatives like population health management and improved utilization management, now is an ideal time for healthcare organizations to engage reporting expertise to establish a strong foundation for data-driven success.
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