Data-Driven Excellence: Making Your Information Work for You

Ask any health care executive, and they'll likely tell you one of their greatest challenges is the demand to process and analyze overwhelming amounts of information at the drop of a hat — everything from declining reimbursements, to pay-for-performance, to core measures, and more. They know gathering data is one thing, but being able to use it in a meaningful way, to effect change is a whole other thing. MEDITECH is committed to helping you unlock your information potential and achieve a level of Data-Driven Excellence by providing a set of tools which allow you to quickly and easily make sense of your data...and more importantly, to act on the data, ultimately helping to improve the quality of care and the operational performance of your organization.

What is Data-Driven Excellence?
Data-Driven Excellence can mean different things to different health care organizations. However, at its core, the concept can best be described as the act of allowing the information you've collected to tell the story of where your organization is and where you would like to go.

In order to fully understand Data-Driven Excellence, you must first recognize the reporting paradigm and move away from it. The reporting paradigm is the commonly-held mindset that "reporting" is simply the gathering and consolidating of information onto a piece of paper. With the emergence of new technologies, however, it is no longer necessary to use the same outdated reports of the past. Once you look beyond these pre-conceived reporting limitations, you can re-identify how you want to use your organization's data, determine what tools you want to take advantage of, and proceed to improve the overall operational effectiveness of your organization.

Data-Driven Excellence also entails making a commitment as to how you will use your data to improve operational effectiveness, by optimizing workflow at the individual level, and streamlining the day-to-day processes. For instance, a payroll manager might look at his or her dashboard and realize thousands of dollars in overtime will be accumulated during the month unless schedules are readjusted. By adjusting the schedule accordingly, the manager may be able to limit the overtime to just a few hundred dollars during the month, or perhaps even avoid overtime altogether.

How Do I Get There?
MEDITECH can help you establish what Data-Driven Excellence means to your organization and we can assist you in identifying a plan to get there. MEDITECH has devised a progressive model called the MEDITECH Data-Driven Excellence Adoption Model (similar in concept and logic to the HIMSS Analytics Model for the Electronic Health Record) to guide you on your journey.

This model is a seven-stage plan for organizations to progress through, meeting short- and long-term goals along the way. The stages progress from the least complex functionality of a data system (pure data entry) to process improvement initiatives, such as operations automation and bioterrorism surveillance. The right-hand side of the model matches the stage of adoption with the corresponding technologies and reporting capabilities offered by MEDITECH, the Institute for Health Metrics (IHM), and Medisolv.


MEDITECH Data-Driven Excellence Adoption Model

As a MEDITECH customer, you have most likely already achieved up through Stage 3 or Stage 4 compliance and have a solid foundation for progressing up the model. Below, we outline for you how your organization can reach Stages 5-7, including the technologies needed to achieve these levels of excellence, as well as some sample screen shots from those solutions. Click on each button for details.

How Do I Continue to Champion Excellence?
As a MEDITECH customer, your organization can continue to use a variety of reporting tools to improve operations, lower costs, increase patient and employee satisfaction, achieve more profitable reimbursement, and promote better patient care. In addition, you can continue to champion excellence by:

Analyzing data and take action Setting goals and initiatives Driving operations with data Measuring and monitoring effectiveness Continuing to target areas for improvement. How Can I Learn More? MEDITECH would like to congratulate those customers who are successfully demonstrating the use of data and information in a way consistent with the advanced stages of the MEDITECH Data-Driven Excellence Adoption Model.