Visualize the Path to Healthcare Savings
By Kathleen Goepferd, Tableau Software
In a recent white paper, “The ‘Big Data’ Revolution
in Healthcare: Accelerating Value and
Innovation,” McKinsey & Company estimated
that data-driven insights could enable up to
$450 billion in reduced U.S. healthcare costs
without compromising outcomes.
The authors identified the following pathways
to these potential savings:
- Right living: Encouraging patients to
make healthier choices
- Right care: Ensuring that patients receive
the most appropriate, timely care
- Right provider: Selecting providers with
the best skill set match and proven
outcomes
- Right value: Continuously improving cost-effectiveness
of care
- Right innovation: Improving not just
care and therapies, but innovation centers
as well
As the title of the white paper makes clear,
harnessing the power of data is the key to success.
Innovative data visualization tools can
help you capture your share of these savings.
Right Living
Data visualization can help you quickly identify
and provide increased support to patients
making less desirable choices.
Jennifer Hayden, IT analyst at Louisiana Breast
and Cervical Health Program, is using data
visualization to identify patients missing recommended
follow-up exams.
“Who are the women who are extending
their time longer than the recommended 18
months for rescreening mammograms? We
dig deep into patient info for quality control,
finding trends, and working on program evaluation,”
she said.
Right Care
The move from a fee-for-service payment
model to an outcome-driven reimbursement
model makes tracking and managing quality
metrics crucial. Using data visualization to
identify problems more quickly allows you to
enact improvements before your reimbursement
is affected.
Southern Maine Medical Center (SMMC) data
analyst Jonathan Drummey has made data
visualization a core part of the community
hospital’s quality initiatives, using a tool to
visualize quality measures that affect reimbursement
from Medicare.
“We can identify where we’re performing and
also where we’re not meeting the target. That
way, we can address it in a timely fashion
before the end of the measure,” he said.
“Being able to act on it on a more timely basis
lets us actually meet the measure in a better
fashion.”
Right Provider
You can steer patients toward the most suitable
provider and identify providers with
the best outcome measures using data
visualization.
Kaleida Health, the largest healthcare provider
in Western New York, used data visualization
to identify a trend of Medicaid patients
making emergency room visits for nonemergency
health problems such as headaches
and fevers. The project took only a day but
identified a great opportunity for savings. “The
next thing you know, it was a local news story,
using the data that we pulled from our data
visualization tool,” said Jennifer Kuebler, corporate
analyst at Kaleida.
SMMC is using data visualization to easily
understand and manage large quantities of
quality metrics for its hundreds of physicians.
“We’re tracking over 1,500 metrics at this
point … our data visualization tool lets us take
in all of that data, identify outliers, and help
performance improve in the hospital,” Drummey
said.
Right Value
Data visualization can help you identify
opportunities to improve efficiency and deliver
savings. For example, Seattle Children’s used
data visualization to identify ways to improve
efficiency, effectively increasing capacity.
“For all intents and purposes we created more
beds, even though we didn’t physically build
them,” said Drexel DeFord, senior vice president
and chief information officer at Seattle
Children’s.
Right Innovation
Finally, data visualization can help streamline
R&D productivity, lowering costs of development
and speeding time to market. Biotech
consultants Advanced Bio-Logic Solutions
(ABLS) attribute roughly 25 percent of the cost
of developing a drug to the enrollment of subjects
in a clinical trial study.
“Using a data visualization tool helps clients to
make decisions on the fly,” said ABLS CEO
Jeff Epstein. “When you can make better,
more active decisions on the fly and have
oversight of the clinical research organizations
or multiple sites that you’re conducting,
then it will absolutely increase the enrollment
process.”