Healthcare organizations today are heavily focused on leveraging data at the point of care to drive decisions and improve clinical outcomes. Willis Knighton Health, a large, not-for-profit healthcare organization in Shreveport, Louisiana, is no exception. By implementing an enterprise-wide electronic health record (EHR) across its four acute-care hospitals, more than 140 clinics and other care settings, and leveraging evidence-based clinical decision support at the point of care, clinicians consistently have the meaningful data they need to make timely and informed decisions.
While having clinical data is crucial, just as crucial is the availability of actionable data for executive-level strategic decision-making. EHRs provide rich real-time data, which, when effectively utilized, enables organizations to analyze patient trends, uncover growth areas and optimize resource allocation.
“Adopting a data-driven approach across all areas of our complex, multi-entity health system is yielding significant benefits for Willis Knighton, enabling us to improve patient care and reduce costs,” said Willis Knighton Senior Vice President and CIO Mark Galea.
The health system improves these benefits with the assistance of a robust data governance program. With a strong foundation established, it matured its integrated enterprise data repository and transformed its analytics service delivery model.
Establishing a data governance strategy
Willis Knighton’s analytics strategy was part of a larger organizational initiative to implement data governance and access models. This new model is led by senior leaders over clinical operations, quality, ambulatory services and finance, and ensures greater transparency and accountability across the organization.
“Our approach provides clear direction on the source of truth for classes of data, including what data should be made available to each class of users and what algorithms are used for reporting,” he said. “Within this framework, our reporting/analytics team enabled self-service tools for our business and clinical leaders, increasing our velocity to democratize access to data.”
Identifying an analytics solution
With their governance model in place, the next step to rolling out an advanced data strategy was to evaluate the analytics tools available.
“We’re committed to being a fiscally responsible organization, so we always evaluate the capabilities of our current licensed solutions before considering additional investments,” Galea stated. “We found that by taking a few critical enabling steps within our EHR to simplify and standardize data repositories and by centralizing our analytics strategy under a single solution, we could empower our business and clinical teams with actionable analytical information to measure performance and drive improvement.”
Willis Knighton elected to use the business and clinical analytics solution developed through its EHR vendor as its enterprise reporting repository, due to its inherent integration and flexible executive-level dashboards. This approach allowed the health system to consolidate disparate data lakes, reducing the cost of maintaining the datasets and streamlining the process for developing and delivering analytics to its leaders.
Centralized design leads to measurable cost savings
Vital to Willis Knighton’s success was centralizing its reporting design, development and delivery across the enterprise to increase the velocity and throughput of report development and distribution. After reviewing the use of disparate reporting tools across the enterprise, leaders found that consolidating all resources and streamlining the report request process was not only more efficient but could reduce service costs by more than 50%. They achieved these savings by reducing reliance on outside consultants and contractors, and collapsing multiple data warehouses and visualization tools into one.
“Data fragmentation was a significant issue for us,” Galea explained. “Previously, our report writers would develop multiple variations of customer reports. Now, we have more than 200 ready-to-use reports and analytics dashboards that can be easily tailored to match our unique reporting needs.”
This approach has enabled the health system to more than double the volume of reports generated by using dynamic dashboards that eliminate the creation of redundant reports and analytics. Equally important, it used a self-service model to enable business and clinical leaders to easily sort and filter reporting dashboards on the fly and drill down to view more details.
Measuring results
Willis Knighton’s data-driven approach benefits all areas of the organization, including clinical, operations and finance departments. While the health system has seen numerous benefits, the most impressive include improvements in:
- Evaluating patient volumes to identify growth opportunities: Willis Knighton is evaluating referral patterns to better serve clinics and providers. This has led to investments in technologies and service expansion for specialties and care locations, providing more access to providers. The health system is experiencing new highs in service volumes, and this type of analysis makes the decision-making process for growth more effective.
- Clinical outcomes: Clinical and quality dashboards monitor barcode medication administration, blood bank transfusions and lab throughput, and track regulatory-required clinical quality measures across the organization.
- Operational performance: Willis Knighton developed dashboards to track throughput, evaluate open schedules for radiology exams and accelerate clinic visit schedules to improve patient access, reduce cancellations and increase visit volumes.
- Financial performance: The organization leverages revenue cycle dashboards to help with A/R optimization through claims and denial analysis, reduction in collections backlogs and allocation of billing and collections resources across service lines, clinics and payers.
”Building our analytics tools through improved dashboard design and self-service is a critical component of our continuous improvement program,” explained Galea. “Our data analytics operating and governance model is based on using our EHR to deliver real-time decision support to our clinicians and our business and clinical decision makers. We have re-allocated costs devoted to managing data to generating information to improve care. It’s pragmatic, cost-effective and a critical part of our continuous improvement efforts.”
Looking ahead
Willis Knighton now has a solid foundation for standing up new reports and increasing the speed and volume of reporting. Its EHR and business and clinical analytics solution have been fundamental components in establishing an analytics operating model to better serve business and clinical leaders. The approach has dramatically reduced costs and increased the velocity of providing analytics, as well as enhanced potential value to the organization.
Learn more about the MEDITECH Expanse EHR and Business and Clinical Analytics solution used at Willis Knighton Health.
