An analytics "machine" powers Stanford Children's Health, preventing surgeries from getting canceled and patients from being diverted, a health system leader told Becker's.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based organization launched the analytics platform a year and a half ago to help its patients have a smoother care journey.
"That sounds like looking at the hospital as a machine, but looking at it from the patient's perspective, they want to be moving and flowing throughout the hospital in the right way," Brendan Watkins, chief analytics officer for Stanford Children's Health, told Becker's. "So it's better for their experience."
Analytics is now "embedded in the culture" at Stanford Children's, Mr. Watkins said. When nonanalytics colleagues come up to him saying they use the tool, he says it's "music to my ears."
"For instance, you can see how full the pediatric ICU was in, like, the last three months, and each day you can see individual patients and what types of patients they are, what types of surgery they had, whether they came in from the ED, etc.," Mr. Watkins explained.
So providers can either get a "high-level big picture" of what's going on at the hospital or find data on specific patients, down to their EHRs, he said.
The platform also allows staffers to spot trends and better manage capacity and staffing, Mr. Watkins said.
"If there are too many patients on a particular unit, you don't have the beds, you don't have the staff, then that can lock up the system," he said. "Patients can be delayed in their surgeries or you can have surgeries canceled. Or patients who want to come into our organization have to be diverted or redirected to other organizations. So we're eliminating those as much as possible."