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By Robert J. Beeman
Decision Support Manager
Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center
Hartford, Conn.
To be successful in today's healthcare environment, an organization has to make analytics an integral part of both its financial and clinical operations. That's the approach we've taken at Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center, one of the largest hospitals in Connecticut and the largest Catholic hospital in New England.
As analytical tools have grown increasingly sophisticated, our ability to link outcomes to performance has brought about real change in our culture. Healthcare business intelligence isn't just another function of decision support. A part of our strategic vision, it permeates every aspect of our operation. Analytics offers visibility into performance and provides accountability for everyone, from the department clinician to the top executive.
Using Analytics to Create Strategic Plans and the Scorecards to Measure Success
Saint Francis Hospital created strategic plans for each department such as cardiology or cancer and intertwined them with the organization's broader strategic vision. Through this system, each stakeholder has a clear and instant view of how and whether they're meeting their goals. Web-based scorecards provide everyone from managers and executive directors to staff with the ability to drill down to the patient level to find root causes of performance shortfalls and adverse trends.
In preparation for rolling out this solution, we worked closely with stakeholders to build key indicators for hospital goals into their individual scorecards. We helped them understand the analytics and how the data would be gathered and interpreted. This helped them identify the information and insights they would need from the scorecard to meet these goals.
The results were tools that are enabling us to not only better manage profitability, but also improve important indicators of care and quality. Although we're still early in this program, we're beginning to see improvements in areas such as:
 Patient Length of Stay
Quality of Care
Core Measures
Costs
Readmission Rates
Patient Satisfaction Scores
Using Analytics to Demonstrate Cost Variations in Care
Perhaps the most important development is the creation of a single source of trusted data. Recently we presented cost data to physicians at the Connecticut Joint Replacement Institute at Saint Francis, a dedicated, comprehensive joint replacement service that performed more than 2,700 joint replacement surgeries in its first year.
The first reaction to the data presented was that "these costs can't be accurate." Over the course of several meetings, we were able to trace costs all the way to the invoice level. We demonstrated how tracking a broad range of expenses revealed the ultimate profitability of operations far better than simply considering total charges.
We delineated the significant differences in costs between surgeons who performed total knee replacements. While most were using complete kits, others were using different pieces from more than one kit, which considerably increased costs.
Accurate and actionable information became a driver for changing behavior and heightening the clinician's awareness of how they could better impact the hospital's bottom line. The system revealed considerable differences in costs and the reasons for those variations. Physicians who found themselves out of alignment with the rest of their peers – whether in patient length of stay or cost – didn't want to be an outlier and made corrections.
Using Analytics to Identify Trusted Partners
We believe that analytics will make Saint Francis more competitive as healthcare reform continues to evolve. We've recently launched a program with our case management department that examines and measures readmission rates from skilled nursing facilities.
The data will enable us to make informed judgments about the job these facilities are doing as we search for the best partners to care for our patients. Quality of care and cost are becoming increasingly important as the industry moves inevitably toward bundled payments for care.
Using Analytics to Drive Culture Change and Quality
Building an analytics system that is truly strategic goes far beyond simply installing a few algorithms. We've been successful because we had:
A high level champion who drove the program
Accurate, audited data
Collaboration with clinicians
As a result, Saint Francis has undergone major changes in our culture and in our ability to measure and improve performance. Quality of care, as reflected in our Core Measures and HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) scores, are rising. We've also seen improvements in the cost of care. With the ability to create highly accurate models for contract negotiations, we've gained a strong bargaining position that directly impacts our bottom line. These gains are coming about because we now have insight into the data generated by clinical and financial operations and the ability to use that understanding to build a better healthcare organization.
Robert J. Beeman is Decision Support Manager at Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, Conn. He joined the hospital as Cost and Budget Analyst in 1992, and served as Senior Cost and Budget Analyst before being named manager of Decision Support in 2009. He earned the bachelor of arts in accounting degree from Assumption College in 1991.
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