With the overwhelming amount of data now available to healthcare organizations, it has never been more crucial for hospitals and health systems to use a cohesive data analytics solution to make practical use of this wealth of information.
"The sheer volume of data in the healthcare system today is dizzying, and it often comes from separate and disconnected systems," said Stephanie Kovalick, chief strategy officer and general manager of strategy and research for Sage Growth Partners, during a Feb. 24 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Ingenious Med.
Ms. Kovalick made the case that one of healthcare's greatest data-related challenges is that there is an abundance of information, but limited insights. "All this data should really translate into action and provide physicians with the insights that they need to deliver high-quality care," Ms. Kovalick said. As-is, she noted, asking physicians to wade through oceans of data without giving them the tools to extract relevant information is contributing to burnout and reduced productivity.
During the webinar, Ms. Kovalick joined Doug Mitchell, MD, CEO and co-founder of Adfinitas Health, and Chris Hegge, head of product management at Ingenious Med, to discuss best practices for translating healthcare organizations' data into actionable insights.
The key, they agreed, lies in setting providers up for success from the beginning by equipping them with trustworthy datasets and encouraging leaders to promote the connection between that data and better performance.
"If clinicians don't have the data needed to go in the right direction, if they don't have somebody behind them pointing them in that direction, we find that we don't accomplish what we need to," Dr. Mitchell said.
He continued, "We have to start thinking about physicians, [physician assistants] and nurse practitioners as a workforce. You have to manage them, and in order to manage them well, you need data that they believe and that you believe, and that's actionable."
He added, "If we're going to move toward value-based care, we can't just hope that it's going to happen. As people who manage folks, we're going to have to be able to lead them there."
During the discussion, the experts argued that when clinicians have actionable insights that help them accurately measure performance, they will quickly begin translating data into improvements in care delivery.
"Clinicians respond well to data — it really helps them gain some clarity in how they're doing and how they're caring for their patients," Ms. Kovalick said. "The key is they need to trust the data and have confidence in it. Investing in the right solutions that capture and translate data in the right way is really important to engaging those clinicians and getting them to walk the walk on value, performance and quality in the value-based care world."
That trust comes from building analytics systems around reliable data from the very beginning.
"If you have a stack of information and clinicians find one thing wrong with it, it's going to be a problem," Mr. Hegge said. "That lack of trust is going to be difficult to overcome."
Beyond reliability, timeliness and actionability are equally important when gathering data and working to extract productive insights, according to Mr. Hegge. He went on to describe two examples of strategies that incorporate all three aspects to bridge the "last mile" between raw data and beneficial applications:
- Enabling data continuity: In order to cut out the "noise" and focus only on the most important and high-quality data for your organization, an analytics system must be comprehensive and normalized across all providers, sites and groups.
- Distributing insights at the point of care: When it comes to actually applying insights to achieve organizational goals, the most successful organizations will be those that embed data into the workflow at the point of care, rather than conducting only retroactive follow-ups.
View the full webinar here.
Click here to download the Post-Webinar Whitepaper.
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