The biggest challenges in healthcare: 5 Qs with the president of Highland Park Hospital

Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem (NorthShore) recently implemented an advanced cost accounting platform and is now beginning to focus on transforming their data into action, helping financial, operational and front-line clinical leaders leverage accurate data to make the right decisions every day.

Gabrielle Cummings serves as the President of Highland Park (Ill.) Hospital, where she also has administrative oversight for several key NorthShore operations, including pathology and laboratory services and the GI labs. She recently spoke with Becker’s about the relation-ship between healthcare’s biggest challenges and the use of analytics to drive key business decisions within her organization.

Question: What do you think are the biggest challenges in healthcare today?

Gabrielle Cummings: We are constantly challenged with adequately and consistently staffing various departments in the organization. With staffing shortages in many departments, it’s critical to find ways to run efficiently so that staffing levels correlate to volume demands. Staffing for the appropriate volume is a major challenge, but healthcare organizations face other issues such as declining reimbursements. Balancing these factors along with maintaining quality of care and the ability to reinvest revenue into our healthcare systems are ongoing factors that we’re always assessing. Another challenge is our ability to be innovative. As an industry, we tend to lag behind others in our use of technology, streamlined work-flows and finding ways to create exceptional patient experiences. We are catching up but still have progress to make to match other service related industries.

Q: What are your organization’s biggest challenges around analytics?

GC: Historically, our toughest challenge around analytics has been making sure we have the right data for our leaders to use. We have such an abundance of data from different sources that it can often be overwhelming for operational and clinical leaders to determine which data to use in their day-today decisions. Recently, we’ve used new reporting approaches to get the right data to the right users at the right time. We are working toward using key indicators and trends for the front line leaders, rather than asking them to count every penny or track every number. We want to make things easier while also monitoring the right data and performance outcomes.We also have a data analytics team, who support the organization by synthesizing, using and comparing our current data against historical performance. As an organization, we’re using predictive analytics to help tackle some of our current issues while using that same data to build a business model for the future.

Q: Do operational, service line and clinical leaders have access to financial performance information on a regular basis? If so, to what are they held accountable? If not, why? Is there an expectation that non-finance leaders leverage?

GC: Our leaders do have access to financial performance information on a regular basis and are held accountable to understand and use the data. We try and provide leaders with the necessary key performance indicators and metrics, with the idea that they can use that information to dig deeper into their business. We expect them to be able to discern nuances in the data and use it to make informed decisions.There are often daily, weekly and monthly conversations about data points between team members. Those conversations assist in holding the team accountable to using and understanding the data.

Q: Do you feel there is a gap in data literacy outside of healthcare finance teams around cost and margin analytics?

GC: Data literacy within any hospital is going to be highly variable, but NorthShore’s goal is get all managers proficient in using and understanding data. It is important to remember that some members of the clinical team began as clinicians and moved into leadership. Their core training and focus was hands on care of the patient, not reviewing financial data or reports. As we continue to leverage our healthcare IT platforms and data tools, our goal is to make the data accessible for everyone. We want to make it easy for our staff to use data in making decisions, whether they’re on the finance team or not.

Q: What do you see as the barriers for healthcare systems trying to reduce care and cost variation?

GC: One of the biggest barriers for healthcare systems trying to reduce cost of care is providing hospital staff with the data they need to make decisions. Additionally, we must continue to push innovation by interacting with other industries that have found the key to reducing cost variation for the same service.Healthcare is constantly shifting, and the only way to keep up is to get involved with the community and local legislatures. This ensures that we are informed at the ground level so that we can be proactive in our decisions and planning – we can’t be reactive. Everything from new legislature to changes in Medicare reimbursement can have a huge impact on the healthcare industry. Systems must understand and stay ahead of the legislative curve balls to help reduce costs.

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