Using Data-Driven Insights to Improve Practice Management

Effective practice management includes tracking and reporting patient outcomes, and effectively managing revenue cycle, as well as keeping an eye out for market changes and growth opportunities. Well-managed practices effectively balance supply and demand on a daily, weekly, and long-term basis, actively managing encounter volume, panel size and scope, timeliness of available appointments, and payer mix.

John Muir Health faced challenges in obtaining data that would provide leaders with strategic decision support information that fostered effective practice management. John Muir Health had attempted to use its EHR to obtain this information, but discovered it was unable to meet the complex demand. As a result, the organization relied on burdensome manual work processes, resulting in delays and a backlog of data requests, and limited ability to make well-informed, data-driven decisions.

After leveraging the information within its data warehouse and analytics platform to create a network leadership encounter application, John Muir Health acquired the following capabilities:

EVOLVING PHYSICIAN PRACTICE LANDSCAPE

医生执业的格局正在发生变化，现在有大量的医生受雇于医疗保健机构。导致独立医生执业减少、医疗机构雇用的医生数量增加的一个因素是与管理执业相关的负担。^1,2In addition to tracking and reporting patient outcomes, and ensuring appropriate revenue cycle management, effective practice management requires organizations to effectively balance supply and demand on a daily, weekly, and long-term basis, actively managing encounter volume, panel size and scope, timeliness of available appointments, and payer mix.³

A leader in healthcare in the San Francisco Bay Area, John Muir Health is a not-for-profit integrated system of hospitals, outpatient centers and independent and foundation doctors that offer a full range of medical services. Within John Muir Health’s Physician Network, there are more than 300 foundation primary care and specialty physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners. These physicians include pediatricians, family medicine practitioners, internal medicine physicians, cardiologists, and other specialists who provide services to John Muir Health patients.

THE CHALLENGE OF MANAGING WITH INCOMPLETE PRACTICE INFORMATION

John Muir Health致力于实现三个部分的目标:改善人口和患者的健康、提升患者体验和提供负担得起的医疗服务。It has demonstrated success in achieving goals to lower costs, enhance quality and service, and increase access.

尽管John Muir Health有这样的奉献精神并取得了明显的成功，但在获取实践数据方面仍面临挑战，这些数据将支持从一线员工到最高管理层的领导人进行有效的实践管理。由于缺乏全组织范围内的数据视图，很难评估实践干预对整个系统性能的影响。

DEFINING THE SPECIFIC NEEDS AND USE CASES

John Muir Health认识到有机会通过向高级和业务领导人提供更好的信息来大大改善实践管理，因此邀请主要利益攸关方进一步分析形势，以确定哪些数据可以提供最佳战略和可行动信息，并对其进行优先排序。他们的分析揭示了以下洞见。

Senior leadership’s need for integrated data

Incomplete data limited the Physician Network’s senior leadership team’s ability to make data-driven decisions. Across the entire organization, the total volume of encounters was not well understood or defined. This made it difficult to effectively explore growth opportunities such as opening additional clinics or services, reallocating physicians’ time, or evaluating opportunities in emerging markets. Decisions made without an organizational view could easily result in a change that helped an individual practice or region, but had a negative impact on the organization overall. Without integrated data, it was difficult for John Muir Health to develop a strategic plan that would support growth and maximize patient access, without unnecessary duplication of services.

Regional management team’s need for operational data

Regional Management teams did not have the information they needed to explain and understand budget variances, which hampered their ability to make insightful changes to daily operations that would effectively control costs, meet targeted revenue, and provide appropriate care for patients. To accomplish this goal, they determined that the solution must include performance metrics that provided the level of detail necessary to evaluate individual practice performance, including information on the drivers of performance and patient outcomes.

Practice managers were largely unable to efficiently manage encounter processing. Identifying how long an encounter had been open and if it needed follow up was a challenge. Encounters must be closed before billing can be completed, making an effective encounter closing process critical to revenue cycle and essential to avoid delays in coding, billing, and revenue capture. Also lacking was information regarding the distribution of new patients, a particularly important data point for ACO, and payer data by appointment.

ANALYTICS KEY TO PRACTICE MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENT

John Muir Health had attempted to use the EHR to provide the data leaders required, but discovered the EHR was unable to meet the complexity of the demand. This led to a dependency upon burdensome manual work processes to get to the data, resulting in delays and a backlog of data requests. A flexible analytics solution was required that would provide access to the information leaders desired, enabling practice management improvement.

To execute its desired analytics strategy and provide the information it needed, John Muir Health selected and utilized the Health Catalyst^®Analytics Platform, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and broad suite of analytics applications, and Health Catalyst’s Professional Services.

Bringing together disparate information

分析平台汇集了来自各种来源的世界杯厄瓜多尔vs塞内加尔波胆预测数据，包括金融、供应链、患者满意度和其他运营源系统的数据。John Muir Health依赖此解决方案作为其内部数据的主要来源。除了利用分析应用套件，John Muir Health还与Health Catalyst Professional Services合作开展可视化工具培训，以加快其数据分析师独立开发应用程序世界杯葡萄牙vs加纳即时走地的能力，培养分析师满足已确定的、优先排序的组织和业务需求的能力。

使用分析平台和主题区域市场(SAM)设计世界杯厄瓜多尔vs塞内加尔波胆预测器，John Muir Health开发了一个网络领导接触仪表板，为运营领导提供对实践管理至关重要的信息访问。SAM Designer简化了从源系统提取数据的过程，过去这是一项耗时的手工任务，需要大量的专业IT知识。现在，SAM Designer将相关数据提取到数据集市中，并过滤掉不需要的数据。然后，分析人员对这些数据进行计算，并创建反映结果的可视化结果。

Dashboards for simple visualization

The network leadership team encounter dashboard (see Figure 1) includes critical information, easily visualizing this data, which can be filtered by criteria including location, department, manager, city, site, visit type, financial class, specialty, and provider. The analytic application supports drilling into the detail, all the way to the individual provider and patient level detail. Available data includes:

• 接触统计信息可以随着时间的推移进行趋势分析，与过去四年的表现进行比较，并过滤以包括所有的、新的或已确诊的患者。
• 付款人混合预约和使用情况可以按金融类别和付款人查看。
• Open and closed encounter status—the number of days an encounter has been open is easy to see. The data is grouped by days, supporting the quick identification of outstanding encounters.
• 第三个下一个可用预约——现在很容易可视化第三个下一个可用预约的平均等待时间，并且可以按专业、站点、部门和提供商过滤数据。

The analytics solution provided all of the information stakeholders had identified and prioritized as essential, and more. For the first time, operational leaders can take a data-driven approach to making strategic decisions, effectively balancing supply and demand, managing encounter volume and closure, ensuring timely revenue capture, timeliness of available appointments, and payer mix.

RESULTS

网络领导接触仪表板每天由总统和首席行政官的医生网络和他的直接报告使用，确保改善日常管理的业务。

After leveraging the information within its data warehouse and analytics platform to create a network leadership encounter application, John Muir Health acquired the following capabilities:

• All leaders have on-demand access to performance data at multiple levels from the organization-wide down to the patient and provider level.
• Standardized data and definitions, and one source of truth.
• Senior leaders are making data-driven decisions for strategic responses across John Muir Health to shifts in market, growth opportunities, and emerging markets.
• The regional management teams are using the application to inform:
  • Daily operations.
  • Encounter processing.
  • Patient access.
  • 预算差异。
• By leveraging these new capabilities, John Muir Health has achieved:
• 数据透明度和区域管理团队对关键业绩指标的问责制。
• 与前一年相比，完成的内科门诊改善了14%，从而更快地获得收入。
  • 应用程序中的可视化支持识别遇到未及时关闭的异常值。领导能够跟进，提供额外的支持，以确保完整的临床文件，以便会面可以关闭。
• 通过分析应用程序报告效率。
• Previously, access to the data sources was limited to just a few people. Now, 77 different people use the application, providing immediate access to key performance data.
• 消除了与遭遇有关的报告请求积压情况，并由于改进了数据和访问而大大减少了每月要求提出特别报告的数量。分析师不必把所有的时间都花在创建类似报告的多个版本上，他们可以把时间用于更有价值的工作。

“Being able to access data in an efficient manner has allowed me and other leaders to make proactive changes rather than be reactive to situations. This has shifted our traditional, intuitive management style into a data-driven management style, and is making a difference in aligning staff, physicians, and others in decision making. I am very proud of the Physician Network’s adoption of this tool and feel that our team has become more sophisticated in our approach to managing this very important component of our health system.”

– Lee Huskins
President and CAO
John Muir Physician Network

WHAT’S NEXT

The leadership team plans to continue to use the analytic application to inform John Muir Health’s strategy, and make strategic and operational decisions. By following up on additional opportunities the application surfaces, John Muir Health will continue to improve the value and effectiveness of operations.

REFERENCES

1. Singleton, T., & Miller, P. (2015).The physician employment trend: What you need to know.Family Practice Management, 22(4), 11-15.
2. Page, L. (2016).受雇医生vs自雇医生:谁更快乐?These are the tradeoffs.Medscape.
3. Manage Variation in Demand. (n.d.)Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

ABOUT HEALTH CATALYST

世界杯葡萄牙vs加纳即时走地Health Catalyst是一家新一代数据、分析和决策支持公司，致力于成为大规模、持续改善医疗结果的催化剂。在人口健康和基于价值的护理的先进预测分析新时代，我们是领导者。拥有一套由机器学习驱动的解决方案，数十年的成果改善专业知识，以及无与伦比的整合医2022卡塔尔世界杯赛程表时间疗生态系统数据的能力。我们经过验证的数据仓库和分析平台有助于提高质量，提高效率和降低成本，支持超过8500世界杯厄瓜多尔vs塞内加尔波胆预测万名患者，并不断增长，包括美国最大的医疗系统和前瞻性的医生实践。我们的技术和专业服务可以帮助您让患者在家中和工作场所保持参与和健康，我们还可以在必要时帮助您优化向这些患者提供的护理。我们很高兴被《财富》、盖洛普、Glassdoor、Modern Healthcare等多家公司评为科技和医疗行业的最佳工作场所。

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