Leveraging Internal Data, Analytics for Quality Improvement

May 13, 2020 - At Southern Illinois Healthcare and Care New England, internal data and analytics has empowered the organizations and pushed the quality improvement programs forward.

These programs are contingent on complete and accurate data in order to identify the organizational challenge, build benchmarks for improvement, and boast success. Many organizations, though, partner with consultants to achieve this.

“By nature of the healthcare environment, costs increasing and reimbursement going the other way, we needed to find opportunities to enhance revenue, take out expenses, and revisit how we were doing things,” Greg Wright, MBA, corporate director of finance at Southern Illinois Healthcare told HealthITAnalytics.

Traditionally, this meant hiring consultants to offer suggestions and guide strategy. But many leaders and physicians were tired of hiring outside help for internal affairs.

“The organization had consultant fatigue,” articulated Erin Pelletier, MBA, vice president of operational excellence at Care New England, another organization tapping analytics over consultants. “We had a lot of staff, leaders, and managers say, ‘why did you bring in another consultant? I could have told you what was broken and how to fix it.’”

Many providers within an organization were rightfully hesitant to listen to outsiders coming in and telling them how to change their practice. Even when internal leaders pushed providers to change, many were resistant.

To combat this, both Southern Illinois Healthcare and Care New England began leveraging their own data and analytics. This minimized the need for consultants and made it easier to gain physician buy-in for quality improvement programs.

The first step in this process was getting senior management on board.

“Getting the senior management and other key leaders in the room to talk about what’s important, what we want to achieve over the next year, and how that ties into our long-term objectives is critical,” Wright emphasized.

Buy-in from others trickled down easily after senior leadership agreed to the strategy, including practicing clinicians.

“We have a very engaged and very data-driven chief medical officer,” Wright mentioned. “What was key to us was meeting with her and going over the reports with her. So once we got that buy-in, she helped us with some of the barriers we had with practicing physicians.”

Care New England took a similar approach, understanding the importance of generating physician buy-in early on.

“We turned the model upside down to empower the frontline staff to improve when they saw something that was not working or inefficient,” Pelletier said. “We asked the provider where we should start. Anecdotally, we wanted to know what they were hearing on the unit to understand where we should dive deeper.”

The team then used its own data and analytics to dive further into the area's physicians had pointed out.

“After we go through and pull the data to identify trends and see variation, we pull those department leaders in or key physician champions who really understand the practice,” Pelletier continued. “They put the data in context.”

Frontline clinicians and leaders understand the day-to-day aspects of care. They know that Doctor Y approaches things differently than Doctor X, so that is why their costs might vary. Understanding this makes it easier to target quality programs.

“We created the right teams to understand the process behind these stories and drive the improvement,” Pelletier said.

While reducing costs remains at the forefront of many quality improvement programs, involving frontline leaders also allowed Wright’s team to identify innovative solutions not directly associated with costs.

“The big dollar items always bubble up to the top as far as the first thing we look at,” he noted. “But we also look at what areas leaders see as critical to growing. Maybe we have just inherent, non-financial pain points.”

Leveraging internal resources rather than seeking external solutions helped overcome protests from those who may fear change.

“It’s not me, going down and having conversations with the top leading surgeons in the state, trying to tell them that their practice is wrong,” Pelletier said. “It needs to be the experts and those physician champions that really help drive the conversation.”

Having internal data and analytics only made Pelletier’s argument stronger.

The shift away from consultants to internal solutions empowered both organizations to seek creative strategies and helped decrease physician resistance to change, ultimately allowing their quality improvement programs to thrive.