Please join us - June 15, 2020 - 2:30pm ET - 3:15 ET
Webinar - "New Ways to Win - A provider perspective on what it takes to become Data-Driven"
(With examples on how your data is the key to help you
navigate your way through COVID-19)
Analytics Techniques
Analytics techniques that will be discussed include: statistical analysis using control charts (example shown below), comparison of individual staff performance to the team mean, prior period analysis, and gap analysis.
Alerts
Alerts mine the data automatically to provider users with insights that would otherwise have to be gleaned by examining and analyzing multiple dashboards. Automated analysis at multiple levels of granularity, such as by program, supervisor, or staff, obviates the need for users to drill through the data to make their own discoveries.
While drilldowns and cross filters are powerful and essential tools, experience shows that requiring managers, supervisors and clinicians to drill through the data to make meaningful discoveries requires extensive training and experience. Relying on dashboard users to perform the analysis takes time away from their critical job functions, and can easily result in the most important insights being missed.
A flexible alert structure focused on identifying weekly changes in performance helps an organization recognize and respond to changes in their care environment (such as in the case of COVID-19), and/or changes in clinical or financial operations, and promotes a common understanding of the insights revealed by data - allowing organizations to focus on action, versus data analysis for its own sake.
While alerts provide a starting point for learning, "What's getting in our way?", and "What's helping us succeed?", the data that underlies the alerts must be made available to stakeholders in an intuitive way that allows them to develop their own understanding of the operational characteristics that drive performance (afterall, they are the ones who know the most about the processes they're following and the obstacles they're encountering!).
This requires a number of different perspectives on the data, including data visualization (illustrated below a daily trend chart for the measures selected), comparative analysis tools (such as gap analysis), comparison of means, comparison to prior periods, etc. Easy access to these views (click on an alert) allows users to reconcile the data with the alert and develop an understanding of the underlying causes.
The impact of changes in clinical operations on financial performance
Finance teams need to be able to translate clinical performance changes into financial terms (afterall, no matter how well we perform on clinical measures, our bills are paid in cash). This means that finance needs insight into the impact of changes in clinical performance on revenue and cash.
Techniques for developing meaningful insight into the relationship between clinical performance measures and revenue and cash will be described. The impact clinical life cycle issues have on revenue can be calculated in terms of revenue opportunity to determine how the organization's financial position will be affected by changes in the clinical life cycle, allowing managers to weigh each issue's relative importance from a financial perspective.
Comparisons of revenue opportunity cost allow financial analysts to project revenue deltas resulting from changes in the clinical environment, such as projecting revenue shortfalls from the impact of social distancing on attendance.
In the chart shown above, the revenue opportunity at appointments increased by about 1 standard deviation above the 24 week mean after the onset of social distancing, indicating a revenue shortfall of about $2K per week due to changes in attendance rates.
Collectively, analytics best practices allow an organization to shift the focus from analyzing data and dashboards to meaningful action, and provides them with a framework for leveraging widely accepted principles for total performance management (such as LEAN) that have been used successfully in other industries to achieve performance management and improvement.
The webinar will be presented by Jonathan "JB" Brown, Controller for Crossroads Health. Using the prism of Accounting and Finance, his career has provided him 26 years of perspective on how clinicians orient to performance standards, and constantly battle the fallacy of budget based performance as a standard of financial truth. In various leadership roles throughout his career JB has led organizational efforts from the millions to the billions.
