mi healthcare whitepaper - metric insights · 2019-12-06 · healthcare professionals only want to...

WHITEPAPERBridging the Last Mile

to Healthcare Analytics

individual tile. Users can easily identify metrics that are of interest to them by simply following a tile much in the way that a user “likes” an item in Facebook. By following the metrics that are of interest to them, each user develops a personalized profile with their unique signature of metric and KPI interests. This allows a hospital administrator to follow different metrics from those that interest a provider. The system delivers a completely different experience based on each user’s personalized profile while eliminating the need for a centralized IT department to publish and maintain an ever-changing set of dashboards.

Push Intelligence is a new approach that enables the business analyst to better support the needs of the business user. Rather than requiring business users to crawl through dashboards to find relevant changes, PI proactively alerts users to important changes in their KPIs, and provides the supporting context that quickly identifies root causes and gets teams quickly into coordinated action.

A personalized approach, focused around the individual needs of each business user, rather than use cases, makes sure that each user is getting actionable information when they need it.

Allow Context and Collaboration

Data without context has no value. Most BI tools only provide the data visualization without meaningful collaboration or context capabilities. In a majority of situations, professionals must collaborate with colleagues through lengthy email threads or in hallway conversations.

“Let’s face it: It’s a big mistake to place several bar and pie charts on a screen side by side and assume that business viewers will know what they mean and what is important in them,“

- Mark Smith, Ventana Research1

BI tools typically allow users to add comments to charts or reports. The comments are stored as part of the report, meaning that a user looking at a metric via one chart or dashboard will not see commentary from a user who may have viewed the same data via another chart or dashboard. As a result, users must resort to email threads and other “back channels” to stitch together a conversation to determine what happened and support effective collaboration.

Metric Insights stores metadata and comments together with the metrics themselves. This ensures that user comments, impacting events, thresholds for alerting and more remain tied to the data. Wherever a metric is used, in any chart or alert, the supporting metadata stays with it automatically, and all users viewing the same data get complete context.

1 The Pathetic State of Dashboards, http://marksmith.ventanaresearch.com/2012/08/21/the-pathetic-state-of-dashboards/

Deploy quickly and iterate

Professionals want to see immediate results of their work. Many BI and visualization tools vendors require weeks or months of IT work just to provide the first initial output. The large volume of evolving healthcare regulations means that analytical requirements can change rapidly and in ways that were not conceived when the original design was created.

Metric Insights provides the healthcare analytics team a rapid-deployment model that delivers results in hours. This ensures the success of the first deployment as well as on an ongoing basis to support ever-changing requirements and regulatory compliance beyond the original scope.

Seamlessly interface with existing applications

Healthcare IT professionals typically support multiple systems for EMR in order to deliver best-of-breed solutions as well as a variety of solutions that represent a significant past financial investment. Many solutions require displacing some or all other existing applications, creating risk and uncertainty that can lead to a poor analytics experience for all of those involved. Gartner research recently estimated that as many as 70-80% of BI projects fail.1

Metric Insights provides a flexible analytics system that extends your existing infrastructure. In addition, if your organization in considering an upgrade or expansion of one or multiple systems, Metric Insights can reduce the risk and implementation time of the effort by providing an Analytics system that will bridge older infrastructure transparently while supporting the new architecture in a way that will consistently deliver key analytics even as source systems are replaced.

About Metric InsightsMetric Insights lets your users cut through the noise, focus immediately on the critical business issues that warrant their attention, and take action. Our Push Intelligence platform connects quickly and easily to your existing business intelligence tools, big data and SaaS applications. Metric Insights uniquely delivers a patented KPI warehouse, collaboration and notification technologies that tell you when your key business metrics have changed, and, more importantly, why.

1 Gartner Research, http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280094776/Poor-communication-to-blame-for-business-intelligence-failure-says-Gartner

7 Steps to Push IntelligenceThis white paper addresses seven areas on which a healthcare IT organization should focus to ensure success in implementing Push Intelligence:

• Provide insights that find the practitioner, not the other way around

• Never require users to wait

• Personalize delivery of Metrics

• Allow Context and Collaboration

• Remove training from the equation

• Deploy quickly and iterate

• Seamlessly interface with existing applications

Provide insights that find the practitioner, not the other way around

The last thing a busy healthcare professional wants to do is log into yet another application every day or to hunt through multiple dashboards and reports. By the time the professional finds time to do this in his or her busy day, it may be too late to take action to address a serious issue identified by a critical metric.

To counter this problem, alerting is usually something that is bolted on to healthcare analytics implementations. Often however, it is done at a global level and is not personal to users. Users not only get swamped with dashboards, they get swamped with alerts, and have to dig through them to find what’s important to them.

Metric Insights delivers key healthcare metrics within an application without requiring the user to access multiple systems. With the Metric Insights’ daily digests sent as e-mails, users see, at a glance, impactful changes to the metrics that they follow and can take action without logging into the system. With Metric Insights’ embeddable tiles, users can see important metrics from other applications that they use every day, such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or other online patient tracking and charting systems.

Metric Insights automatically monitors metrics and provides personalized alerts based on statistically significant changes in the data or when metrics cross a particular threshold. Users do not have to continually check on data, they will be told what they need to know, when they need to know it.

Never require users to wait

Professionals rarely have time to search or wait for information. Many healthcare analytics applications are focused around the ad-hoc analysis of large data sets meaning they have inherent delays while the system fetches the data and creates charts and visualizations on the fly. Especially with large data sets, or Big Data, long delays can make analytics systems completely unusable or prohibit their usage in the first place by business users. Often, dashboard solutions require a power user or IT professional to design, test, and build a dashboard. Dashboard change requests pileup forcing users to wait weeks or months for their dashboard to be modified or enhanced.

Metric Insights is designed to only store the metrics that matter to business users along with any corresponding context. It eliminates the wait by maintaining a persistent caching layer that stores the data required to create any given chart or visualization. The system queries the database in the background on a frequency determined by the metric’s creator. This is completely transparent to the end-user. Metric Insights’ Business Intelligence Automation layer pre-renders every chart and visualization before they are requested. The result is that a user instantaneously sees visualizations without any wait, no matter how long it takes to create the underlying analytics or the complexity of the database query involved.

Personalize delivery of Metrics

Businesses today, have more data available to them than ever. The dilemma though is that the dashboard approach to healthcare analytics is already failing. More and more dashboards are being published around different business use cases (e.g. <healthcare examples>). Users are experiencing data overload and are struggling to make sense of what matters in the data to make productive decisions.

“Only 17% of...data workers...use a data dashboard or business intelligence tools as part of their job“

- Forrester Research, Inc., Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q4 20121

Healthcare professionals only want to see the data that is relevant to them. Yet, most healthcare analytics tools require the user to search through dozens of static dashboards to find relevant data. This problem is exacerbated by vendors that encourage wide-scale deployment of new dashboards to more users in an organization. Soon, the organization has a proliferation problem in which sometimes hundreds of dashboards are created. The end-user has to navigate through a sea of dashboards to find the information required.

Metric Insights Push Intelligence platform eliminates the entire dashboard paradigm and replaces it with a more intuitive “publish and follow” system. Each metric is published as an

www.metricinsights.com | [email protected] | 800.993.3467

Users will see comment threads in any chart, report or alert that contain an annotated data point. This ensures that the “story” about the result is never lost and every user benefits from the context regardless of how they are viewing the data.

The process eliminates much of the lengthy email exchanges that occur with other systems. Further, the data-point level annotations stay in the chart so all authorized users can see the same information whether at the current moment or at sometime in the future.

Remove training from the equation

Busy healthcare professionals are weary of repeatedly being trained on new applications and tools, taking them away from providing care and services. Requiring training for any new analytics application virtually ensures that it will not be used. Most analytics platforms provide unnecessarily complex interfaces that deliver poor usability and fall short of the ‘zero training’ expectations.

Metric Insights provides an intuitive interface for end-users that requires virtually no training whether on a PC, laptop or mobile device. Because Metric Insights is delivered using HTML5 with a zero-footprint client, the same intuitive experience is achieved both in a browser on a desktop and on a tablet.

Bridging The Last Mile to Healthcare Analytics

Healthcare Analytics are playing a growing role in the industry. Some recent trends include:

• The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) earmarked approximately $19 billion to help physicians and hospitals achieve “meaningful use” of health information. Analysis of this “meaningful use” must be tracked like any other key metric in an organization.

• Healthcare organizations remain under intense pressure to reduce costs and remove inefficiencies while improving quality. Providers find themselves in the middle of market pressures from payers, insurance companies, and the government. The only way to sustain this financially challenging environment is to manage profitability closely and gain an understanding of true costs and profit sources through detailed tracking using analytics.

• The government could penalize hospitals for having readmission rates that are too high by regulatory standards.1

Many healthcare organizations have implemented Business Intelligence (BI) tools for healthcare analytics in the hopes of making their operations data-driven and therefore more effective. Yet, despite the investment of billions in these tools, the technology has under-delivered on its promise. As noted by Gartner and many other analysts, user adoption of tools remains poor.

“Fewer than 30% of potenital users within an organization making use of BI“

- Gartner, Business Intelligence Adoption Trends

The current paradigm – digging through an explosion of dashboards & reports to find significant events and then following email threads to find out what exactly happened – and why – doesn’t help healthcare administrators and practitioners to work smarter or faster. They are strapped for time, so having them focus on analytics in their hectic schedule is a huge challenge. Data is there, and the supporting context is available, but users have to work too hard to find the information that matters to them.

This is the Last Mile Problem of Healthcare analytics and is one that is solved by the Metric Insights Push Intelligence Platform.

1 “Hospitals’ readmission rates still too high, government says,” The Washington Post, July 19 , http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hospitals-readmission-rates-still-too-high-government- says/2012/07/19/gJQAZIqdwW_story.html

Figure: Example of readmission rate tracking with context and collaboration embedded in chart.

mi healthcare whitepaper - metric insights · 2019-12-06 · healthcare professionals only want to...

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