Health Systems Solutions
McKesson Provider Technologies
How do you improve if you don't know how you are performing? How do you manage what you don't measure? McKesson believes analytics is the new frontier for health systems and hospitals because of closely related industry drivers such as pay for performance and consumerism, patient safety and quality, and rising costs and shrinking reimbursement.
There are four main components to how we help our customers achieve top performance — applications, services, consulting and analytics. The first three are familiar offerings. Analytics provides the "turbo power" necessary to turn data into actionable information. In doing so, it helps ensure that our applications, services and consulting offerings are combined to enable customers to measurably improve performance where needed.
Hospitals have traditionally used data for decision support — but used it in a way that I call "Old School." Old School means using claims data for budgeting, contracting and cost accounting — typically by the CFO's team. Analysis of the data has no concept of "time," such as when a medication was administered — which affects patient outcomes. Yet hospitals have spent the last 3-5 years investing in advanced clinical solutions, such as CPOE, bar-code medication administration and data repositories. A myriad of data points are created during the care process and never used again.
Analytic tools provide the opportunity for "New School" use of clinical data. They combine the rich data generated by advanced clinical IT with data from claims, surgery, scheduling, supply chain and other systems. New School analytics answers questions like: Where do we have inefficiencies in the clinical process? Which procedures or MDs are unprofitable? Which nursing units and individual nurses have low compliance with bedside scanning?
Most commonly, New School analytics is driven by the COO, CMO or director of quality. Not because CFOs aren't interested, but because integrated analytics is more of an operational tool rather than solely a financial tool. New School also means the timing and delivery of reports is very different from Old School. New School provides Web-based scorecards with red/yellow/green indicators and drill-down capability to determine root causes of variations, such as incidence of preventable adverse drug events or compliance with post-surgical wound protocols. These tools can also generate business alerts that identify variances and trends. New School organizations evaluate daily, weekly or monthly scorecards by constituent to create a metric-driven culture.
Meeting market demands to improve quality and lower costs can't be done without the ability to "hardwire" results by embedding and monitoring process change, and to focus everyone on performance improvement. To do so, organizations need to move from Old School to New School. Is your organization Old School or New School?
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