Data Driven Approach to Enhancing Efficiency and Value in Healthcare

Session
Quality

Authors
Kristin Goin
Service Consultant
Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

Atul Vats, M.D.
Attending Pediatric Intensivist
Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston

Description
Increasing pressures on healthcare organizations demand the use of timelier, integrated data driven decision making. Case studies from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta will demonstrate how this approach helps organizations realize improvements in resource utilization, patient and staff satisfaction, and operational efficiency. Focus areas include pharmacy, urgent care, and critical care.

Abstract
Healthcare organizations are forced to work smarter to improve access, cost, and quality under increasing pressures of changing reimbursement models and regulatory requirements. Hospitals are starting to realize the benefits of a data driven approach for improvement, but are far behind other industries. Three case studies from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta will be presented demonstrating how financial, clinical, and administrative data is integrated to drive smarter decisions leading to improved efficiency, quality, and satisfaction.

The studies outline how to target, gather, and analyze relevant data to successfully drive improvement and develop tools to maintain success. Studies include: pharmacy waste reduction, urgent care physician staffing, and critical care physician workflow. Children's pharmacy reduced thousands of wasted medications by analyzing data from batch processes, rounding practices, and patient discharge patterns. Urgent Care centers used operational data to create a patient demand forecasting and optimization tool that reduces staffing cost and wait times. Critical Care Medicine used clinical operations data to standardize the rounding process resulting in timelier clinical decisions, reduced rounding duration, and improved satisfaction and provider utilization. The studies will show qualitative and quantitative results in the areas of cost reduction, resource utilization, patient and staff satisfaction, and operational efficiency.