Written by: Martin Szczuczynski, Senior Manager, Strategic Planning, AdventHealth
SHSMD kicked off its first Member Meet-up of the year in April with Dan Miers, Chief Strategy Officer, of SPM Group, Martin Szczuczynski, Senior Manager, Strategic Planning, of AdventHealth, and Pat Barry, VP of Data and Analytics, of SPM Group facilitating the discussion. This opportunity is designed to promote peer-to-peer learning and enable conversation among members to address challenges they are facing. Members expressed a keen interest in performance analytics and 45 SHSMD members from across the country participated in the conversation. In this post, we will recap key highlights and insights.
Dan Miers, a board member of SHSMD and Chief Strategy Officer at SPM Group, highlighted the diverse sources of data organizations must contend with. Where once the focus had been on obtaining data to now, we seek to make sense of it all. From planning and finance data to marketing and web site data, the influx of information can be overwhelming and continues to grow each year. Dan asked the group, how do we understand what is available and determine what truly matters? And, how do we bring insights that will shape our organization’s strategies?
Analyzing Success
Patrick Barry, VP of Data Analytics at SPM Group, shared his experience with marketing data analytics. One of the challenges he experiences is combining various digital marketing data, such as paid search and social display data, with website data. His approach when working with health care systems is to this is to develop a measurement strategy where together they articulate the business goals of the website and select web metrics based on those goals on which to gauge performance. Statistical methodologies are then employed to benchmark performance and provide insights for optimization.
Navigating Metric Selection
Martin Szczuczynski, a senior manager of strategic planning at AdventHealth, highlighted the dual challenges of distilling key performance metrics from the many available down into a concise few as well as selecting metrics for non-traditional areas and special initiatives. New performance categories such as his organization’s aspiration to promote “whole person health” required new thinking to determine appropriate measures of success. By taking steps to clearly define the intended outcomes, creating an inventory of attainable data, and validating sufficient operational resources were available, performance indicators were determined along with their respective targets.
One attendee shared their experience with integrating a special initiative onto their organization’s primary balance scorecard; in this case the implementation of the Epic EMR. Their approach entailed the development of an index score that would gauge the overall progress of implementation. The index score was a composite of a variety of specific implementation indicators that allowed their primary balance scorecard to remain concise by rolling them up into this single index.
Data Warehousing and Integration
Common to us all is the challenge posed by the disparate sources of data. This aggregation, centralization, and integration of data is fulfilled via data warehouses that function to consolidate multitudes of data sets. The group discussed a number of solutions that enable organizations to have a singular source of truth on which to base their analytics and create a comprehensive view of how the organization is performing. Caboodle, one frequent mention among a few participants, facilitates this integration to enable holistic performance analytics.
An area that comes into focus adjacent to this is one of data refinement. With the substantial volume of data available today, the information technology infrastructure must be in place to process these quantities. Some participants noted their volume of data bogged down the performance of their software programs leading to program crashes, poor refresh rates, etc. impacting their stakeholder’s ability to access and review data. Participants discussed how they have been able to resolve many of these issues by refining their data sets. In cleaning up and standardizing data sets to only include the most critical information, organizations had been able to mitigate these performance issues.
Visualization and Insight Generation
To effectively leverage performance analytics, data must be communicated thoughtfully and meaningfully. Many sought insights into how their peers were integrating data with other technologies on the back end for visualization and analysis to enhance how data is accessed and understood. Emerging from the discussion, participants commented on the growing inclusion of performance measures beyond the typical planning and financial measures and the demand to deliver insights into areas such as patient engagement, marketing, and service line operations. Pertinent is the need to understand the role (and efficacy) of marketing in generating a potential patient encounter (lead generation, conversion rates, etc.) as well as access conditions patients are experiencing (wait times, utilization rates, etc.) that may inform how an organization plans around its capacity. This begins to expand the role of performance analytics cross functionally as it reaches into areas beyond traditional planning and finance. This shifting along with the diversity of information available makes complex the development of concise dashboards.
Contextualizing Performance via Benchmarks
Benchmarking is a valuable practice in healthcare performance analytics as it provides a frame of reference for reviewing performance against established industry standards and/or best practices. Some participants noted movement towards these integrations by their organizations as a way to narrow down the wide array of possible measures for scorecard adoption and the setting of realistic targets. The inclusion of current state, future state (target goal), and benchmark values on the performance scorecard promotes continuous improvement and spotlights successes in achieving organizational goals and/or industry standards.
SHSMD’s Member Meet-up on performance analytics provided a platform for members to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with data analytics and representation. The convergence and magnitude of data from numerous sources requires all organizations to develop and advance effective strategies that enable it to extract actionable insights. The conversations among participants shone light on common issues facilitating a collective learning experience. By sharing experiences and learning from peers across the country, we can better support our organizations in navigating areas such performance analytics and more.