The Holistic Approach to Healthcare Benchmarks: Enterprise-Wide Data Gathering and Analytics

Healthcare facilities now almost universally understand the value of using healthcare business intelligence to improve outcomes in patient care, increase patient satisfaction, and enhance financial performance. But, according to Linda Kloss, CEO of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the challenge for enterprises is capturing and later applying the information throughout their organizations.

In order to succeed, business intelligence initiatives have to be considered an essential component of the strategic vision of the hospital or healthcare system. Because the use of data analytics requires fundamental and sometimes disruptive changes in how business as usual is conducted, initiatives must also be supported through strong leadership provided by those at the top of the organization. It is also important that the organization’s leadership focuses on the information itself as being critical to the enterprise’s success, not just the technology.

Standardizing data both within one enterprise and among enterprises is another critical part of using analytics to set healthcare benchmarks, since the use of Electronic Health Records means different organizations will be gathering and then sharing information with each other. Because consistency in defining data is the key to its usability, tools are evolving that will enable data gathered by different institutions to be mapped to a common data framework using a simple messaging system and a single vocabulary, so that data can be shared in a meaningful way.

Finally, the main goal of any analytics initiative always needs to be to collect accurate data and then re-purpose and use it as many times as possible to create the enterprise intelligence needed to maximize the benefit to the organization of the revised processes. Where data used to be gathered for one particular use, like patient care, and available only to those who needed it for that purpose, it should also be available, subject to access policies and controls, for analysis and application in other areas, including quality control, clinical decision-making, population-wide trending analysis, health system management, community-wide best practices development, and clinical research.

Read more about the use of analytics and healthcare benchmarks by visiting McKesson online and reading Effective Analytics is All About Holistic Use of Information, by Linda Kloss, American Health Information Management Association, CEO.