Strata Rx 2013: Data analytics for organizational change
BOSTON--Healthcare leaders should harness the power of data analytics to identify, prioritize and make strategic, operational and clinically actionable changes at the organizational level, said Eugene Kolker, chief data officer at Seattle Children’s and head of the bioinformatics & high-throughput analysis laboratory at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, at Strata Rx 2013.
Describing data as encompassing the five Vs of volume, veracity, velocity, variety and value, Kolker said, “We need to make it all actionable.” Key to organizational change, he said, are three elements: an analytics team, clinical champions for buy-in and empathy for people.
To prioritize enterprise-wide improvements based on metrics, Kolker advised focusing on care and outcomes in departments to get a picture of how well they individually perform and what it takes to meet goals in the following year. In that vein, providers can reconstruct a model of a department based on data from the previous year, in categories such as reputation, fatalities, patient volume and overall infection prevention.
After looking at one department, analysts can identify attributes across multiple departments to pinpoint collective areas needing improvement for the year to come.
In one case study, Kolker said he was charged with identifying the cause of high turnover of nurses and ways of reversing that trend.
Building models, they found that termination rates were higher after healthcare organizations achieved Magnet Status, a desirable achievement obtained by less than 4 percent of U.S. hospitals. It is based in large part on the quality of nurse work, he said.
The researchers also discovered higher termination rates in Seattle proper versus its suburbs, as well as among night shift versus day shift nurses, but when adjusted for age and experience, these discrepancies disappeared.
The major insight gleaned from the data models, Kolker said, was that nurses—predominantly more experienced—were leaving due to pressure at the hospital to maintain Magnet Status and the high amount of reporting involved to achieve this distinction. From this analysis, Kolker said the following actionable items were suggested to the hospital:
- Have discussions with experienced nurses
- Bring on external consultant in-house (in the psychology, sociology or nursing space)
- Pursue hiring readjustment
“Data analytics helps. It’s key to make them actionable to make real outcomes,” he said.