Patient satisfaction scores had leveled off and, in some cases, declined at the widely respected Cleveland Clinic around the time Dr. James Merlino became chief patient experience officer in 2009.
Analytics, Merlino explained at a technology vendor's conference in September, helped the health care organization identify three areas where patients were dissatisfied: respect, communications among Cleveland Clinic staff and happiness of employees. Merlino devised a campaign to get all Clinic employees focused on improving the patient experience through better communication and accountability, with analytics at the heart of effort.
"You have to give physicians data across the care continuum to drive real behavior change," Merlino said. He also explained how even janitors are trained to ask patients waiting in the emergency department if there was anything they could do to make them more comfortable.
Now 82 percent of patients give high ratings to the Cleveland Clinic and 86 percent would "definitely" recommend the organization to family and friends, according to the latest federal Hospital Compare data on patient satisfaction. In 2009, 66 percent of patients gave high ratings and 76 percent would recommend Cleveland Clinic.
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Similarly, Geisinger Health System, covering a huge swath of rural Pennsylvania, has had tremendous success saving money and improving health by mining vast stores of data to identify its sickest and most at-risk patients, then intervening with appropriate prevention and treatment.
In diabetes management, for example, Geisinger was able to prevent 305 heart attacks, 140 strokes and 166 cases of diabetic retinopathy – a retina disease that often leads to blindness – over a three-year period, according to a study published in the American Journal of Managed Care in 2014. By paying for home nursing for about 150 needy elderly patients, the organization's health plan cut overall spending on that group by 7.1 percent and reduced hospital admissions by 27.5 percent, Geisinger President and CEO Dr. Glenn Steele Jr. reported at a 2014 health IT conference.
Geisinger, with nine hospitals and a 1,200-physician group at about four dozen practice sites, has invested more than $200 million on information technology over the last two decades. "We couldn’t begin [to put analytics into clinical practice] without having a 20-year history with IT infrastructure," Steele said at the same vendor meeting that Merlino spoke at.
That may be true for a huge institution like Geisinger or the Cleveland Clinic with complex technology systems, but advanced data mining is becoming accessible to smaller and independent health care organizations.
Like so many other hospitals, Beaufort Memorial Hospital in Beaufort, South Carolina, often doesn't have enough beds to meet patient demand. "We're full all the time," noted Edward Ricks, CIO and vice president of information services for the 197-bed facility that handles 55,000 visits to its emergency department, 200,000 outpatient visits and 10,000 inpatient admissions a year.
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The earlier in the day patients are discharged, the faster new patients can be assigned to rooms. Ricks figured that the hospital could save about $435,000 annually by moving discharges up by as little as a half a day. Shorter average length of stay also means more capacity and, thus, potentially higher revenue from additional patients.
Within a few weeks of implementing technology to track patient flow – and with a little education of the medical staff – physicians at Beaufort were writing 50 percent of discharge orders to release patients by noon, Ricks said. Management soon changed the goal to 9 a.m.
Currently, Beaufort Memorial is trying to analyze when each patient will be discharged, then work backward in an effort to improve daily planning, lining up such things as prescriptions, follow-up doctor visits, wheelchair transportation to the exit and room cleaning so the whole process goes smoothly. "Our primary objective is reducing length of stay," Ricks said.
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