At a Glance

Background and Challenge

An integrated healthcare delivery system in the Pacific Northwest had already become the first live, Epic-hosted client and built the infrastructure required to handle the influx of data. Just two years after the implementation, they wanted to harness their data to create next-level analytics programs and demonstrate true marketplace leadership.

Solution

The healthcare organization first implemented Caboodle, and Tegria experts assisted with evaluating and demonstrating the new platform’s capabilities. Within four months, the organization opted to supplement Clarity and Caboodle with a custom data warehouse outside the hosted environment to advance their ability to report on innovative healthcare metrics. While leaders felt they had met most of the organization’s data needs, they still wanted to accelerate and integrate financial and healthcare data for fully costed procedures and clinical productivity.

The decision to go with a customized data warehouse necessitated the creation of a new business intelligence (BI) team within the finance department. The team initially focused on high-priority descriptive analytics — specifically data visualization and integration of Epic, cost accounting, human resources, and survey data. Tegria supplemented the new BI team with expertise in healthcare data modeling, deep knowledge of industry standards and best practices, experience in building sustainable development capabilities, and a knack for collaborating across internal and external stakeholders.

To begin extending the data warehouse, the group first tackled clinical productivity. Tegria experts collaborated with the internal team to analyze patient panels and create patient access dashboards that provided both high-level and drill-down views of provider and clinic productivity for primary care and specialty departments.

They moved on to integrating loss and general ledger data with Epic healthcare data, then created custom dashboards to report on the costs of providing specific services. Instead of reporting on collective departmental costs as does most of the industry, Tegria helped report on costs at the procedure level. For example, instead of simply determining the financial health of the cardiac department, they could evaluate margins on specific procedures like knee replacements. The system could now allocate direct and indirect organizational expense data to the net revenue transaction level.

Results

Laying a foundation for advanced analytics enabled the internal teams to become more engaged with their jobs. Instead of simply working with data, they can now understand it and be more confident in its integrity.

The new BI team’s immediate success helped them develop a reputation for executing highly complex projects within their organization. They have since assisted more departments with their data needs, including managed services, quality assurance, and clinical leadership.

Engagement outcomes included:

• Building a robust BI and predictive analytics solution
• Calculating fully-costed procedures by integrating accounting and billing data and allocating expenses to revenue transactions
• Conducting primary care provider-patient panel analysis
• Creating patient access dashboards for high-level and drill-down metrics on clinical productivity