Becker's 11th Annual Meeting: 4 Questions with Meng Wei, System Director of Quality Informatics and Analytics at UCLA Health

Meng Wei, MBA, serves as System Director of Quality Informatics and Analytics at UCLA Health.

On May 24th, Meng will give a presentation on "How To Improve Your Public Ranking" at Becker's Hospital Review 11th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place on May 24-26, 2021 in Chicago.

To learn more about the conference and Meng's session, click here.

Question: What, from your perspective, is the biggest challenge about the future of work for hospitals, and what can they do about it? (i.e. automation, desire for more flexibility, clinician shortages, etc.)

Meng Wei: The biggest challenge about the future of work for hospitals is how to meet the need for high-quality and affordable healthcare in America. I believe that one of the most critical ways hospitals can address that need is to harness the power of the data collected over the past decade and transform them into actionable insights. We need to embrace the power of data analytics to help hospitals evolve from intuition-driven to insight-driven institutions.

Many of us who work in healthcare watched with excitement as hospitals made collecting data a top priority, expecting that, somehow, the data would naturally lead to insights that could help hospitals provide better care at a lower cost. More recently, however, we have realized that the transformation from data to insight is far from natural or automatic, and we need a strong internal analytic team to actively gain insights from data. Thus, we need to invest in an infrastructure that builds robust internal analytical capabilities. Hospitals should prioritize the formation of strong and well-supported analytical teams whose sole focus lies with gleaning insights from the data that is continually collected, the development of experienced and empowered leaders for those teams, and integration of analytical teams into existing decision-making processes with buy-in from key stakeholders.

In addition, hospitals should focus on developing data literacy among practitioners and administrators. Data, and the insights that a strong analytical team will generate, can only turn into practicable changes when an understanding of data grows to include the entire hospital workforce.

Ultimately, our ability to respond to evolving healthcare needs in the future will significantly depend on our ability to learn from our data. This is a challenge we can meet, but only if we invest in making the most of our data and in helping our workforces embrace and understand what data can tell us.

Q: What, if anything, should hospitals be doing now given economists' projections of a forthcoming economic downturn?

MW: Given these projections, hospitals should focus on investing in a greater understanding of where they currently stand and identifying possible strategies to weather the storm. To do this, hospital leadership teams should develop robust internal analytical capabilities that can help preemptively identify and address existing vulnerabilities. These analytical capabilities can also help leaders evaluate new proposals for their ability to contribute to a hospital's strength in the face of a downturn. Lastly, a strong internal analytical team can help hospital leadership teams respond quickly if challenges do arise.

Q: How can hospitals reconcile the need to maintain inpatient volumes with the mission to keep people healthier and out of the hospital?

MW: We should accept that shorter hospital stays and more outpatient care are the inevitable future of our industry. Our challenge now is to adapt to those trends. In consultation with a strong internal analytical team, a hospital's leadership team can better understand the strengths and weaknesses of its existing business not just at present, but as needs change in the future. Empowered with this business intelligence, the leadership team can focus on developing the hospital’s strengths and addressing its weaknesses.

Q: What do you see as the most exciting opportunity in healthcare right now?

MW: The most exciting opportunity in healthcare right now is data analytics. Using existing data, analytical teams can inform and improve decision-making processes on topics ranging from reducing practice variance to improving health outcomes to increasing patient satisfaction. Data analytics can help us understand healthcare and hospitals in a new perspective, which, coupled with the experiences of practitioners, can give us a more comprehensive view of how a hospital can succeed, and how to prevent it from failing. The impact of data analytics is still not fully understood, as investment in healthcare analytical infrastructures has only just begun; I believe, however, that it will be able to transform the way that hospitals evaluate their business and improve their care.

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