Hospitals in the midst of transformation need leaders with a new skill set to drive results: data analytics.
"Today's leader must be prepared to quickly respond to changing market dynamics or shift in volumes," said Patty Donley, president of WellSpan Good Samaritan Hospital and system vice president of WellSpan Health in York, Pa. "Through real-time metric assessment and an infrastructure that identifies the need to pivot when needed, agile leaders support an environment that responds quickly to market demands."
Hospitals have more data than ever before with EHRs and technology platforms gathering information on clinical care and operational workflows. Artificial intelligence can help organize and present the data, but leaders need to interpret the information and translate it into action.
"In order to optimize the allocation of scarce resources, teams will need to better understand how standard KPIs intersect," said Edmund Pritbitkin, MD, president of Jefferson Medical Group and executive vice president and chief physician executive at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. "For example, how do reductions in length of stay affect CMI levels, and is that a fair trade-off if you increase the number of individuals you can serve? These metrics must also be refined so that we look not only at contribution margins generated per case or per admission but also at contribution margins per LOS and length of operating room or ICU time."
Clinical leaders will also need a keen focus on metrics and understanding how to incorporate both quality and cost data into their decision-making processes. Data analytics skills also help organizations see the value of consolidation or expansion of services and adjust accordingly, said Dr. Pritbitkin.
"The acute care setting demands multiple skills in clinical management. Our quality focus requires the team to deep dive into each metric, create collaborative ownership, and focus on meaningful interventions that will create impactful outcomes," said Mayank Shah, MD, vice president and chief medical officer of Condell Medical Center, part of Advocate Health.
In one example Dr. Shah shared, his team focused on "observed outcomes " and realized when the outcomes weren't aligned with expected ratios, there was an opportunity to innovate and discover factors contributing to the calculation.
"Having a deeper understanding of impacts of documentation on these metrics is a skill set required of our team to be successful," said Dr. Shah.
His team also tackled utilization challenges to eliminate inefficiencies in workflows and identify process metrics that correlate with outcomes, in particular around length of stay.
"It's frustrating to ask providers to manage length of stay, which is commonly impacted by multiple factors," said Dr. Shah. "However, we discovered that having 60 or more discharges per day automatically improves LOS. So, setting that as a target for our providers became an opportunity for actively managing length of stay. Our team needs to be skillful in finding these correlations that can help us practically drive outcomes."
Tampa General Hospital has taken a similar approach to leveraging data on its mission to become the "safest and most innovative academic health system in America," Peggy Duggan, MD, executive vice president and chief medical officer, told Becker's. Data analytics is central to the mission.
"We are focusing on being the best in analytics, high reliability and team member engagement in system problem-solving," said Dr. Duggan. "I have developed several roles to support advancing that vision in the chief medical office. The medical director of clinical analytics is a liaison between our clinical and data teams, providing insights that inform the organization's strategic decisions."
Tampa General also has a director of high reliability to develop the high reliability program and identify and mitigate risk, and a director of quality to promote performance improvement. These roles will be critical for transformation, Dr. Duggan said, and they must understand making data actionable.
Some healthcare organizations, including the Veterans Health Administration, are bringing on additional data scientists to bridge the skill gap.
"The team in the VHA chief strategy office is responsible for advising senior most leaders on the future direction of the VA healthcare system using data to support evidence-based decision making," said Valerie Mattison Brown, chief strategy officer of the VHA. "Data scientists will be needed more than ever to conduct enterprisewide analysis of our healthcare markets, including statistical and geospatial analysis highlighting population health, socio-economic needs and traditional health system optimization."