Leaders at Catholic Health Initiatives have committed resources to eliminating variation by standardizing care, aligning physician compensation, and building the efficient service line.
This article appeared in the June issue of HealthLeaders Magazine.
At any health system, reducing variation is always the second step. First, of course, are the deceptively tricky questions of agreeing on the key metrics and their definitions. In March 2013, Colorado-based Catholic Health Initiatives, with 105 hospitals in 19 states, created the Analytics Center of Excellence, part of the Enterprise Intelligence team, to answer these questions. Developing common data standards across a clinical enterprise as large as CHI required a lot of education, collaboration, and communication to build consensus, says Jim Reichert, MD, PhD, vice president of enterprise intelligence for CHI.
"In order to reduce variation, you need to identify a best practice," Reichert says. "And in order to do that, you need to have a national reporting standard across the enterprise. That allows for risk-adjusted data to be used in an apples-to-apples comparison."
CHI began by identifying a "single source of truth" for each metric that would be used in its standard reporting solution. The data source for length of stay, mortality, and complications is Premier Quality Advisor, but for healthcare-acquired infections, CHI uses the CDC"s National Healthcare Safety Network. Patient experience data comes from HealthStream, Reichert says.
Jim Molpus is the director of the HealthLeaders Exchange.