Data and analytics

With the major league baseball playoffs underway, Vizient Research Institute executive director Tom Robertson draws parallels between the national pastime and the typical medical center or health system’s financial business model. In this latest essay, Tom shares findings from the Institute’s last major study, pointing to opportunities to enhance the bottom line while improving the lives of our most vulnerable patients.

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When hospital leaders are presented with performance improvement opportunities uncovered through Vizient's clinical benchmarking data, it’s not uncommon for them to first look for reasons for below-average performance rather than consider what changes could be implemented to improve. This happened recently after presenting a length-of-stay (LOS) opportunity to leaders of a large hospital.

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Hundreds of companies are developing medical artificial intelligence applications with billions of dollars in venture capital. Adoption is in the early stages; helping physicians with image interpretation and diagnostic support. But make no mistake, AI is poised to transform the health care landscape.  

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Health care organizations collect patient demographic data including race, ethnicity and language (REAL) to fulfill meaningful use attestation, meet federal accreditation requirements and adhere to CLAS standards (Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services). How organizations use this data, however, varies greatly. Many organizations are beginning to use the information with their clinical quality and safety improvement efforts.

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My favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” It’s an easy argument to show that we continually end up somewhere else in our current health care performance improvement efforts, and most times that somewhere else is the land of no change. No matter the laudable efforts of many people, we seemed to get derailed in our improvement efforts by everything from unengaged clinicians to a lack of... More

With health care spending in the United States now exceeding $3 trillion, and a recent government report stating that Medicare could become insolvent by 2026, it’s critical health care providers have a clinical analytics program to measure and evaluate outcomes that leads to improvement. More

The Overall Hospital Star Rating system from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is meant to give consumers an easy way to pick the best hospitals for them and their loved ones. Yet, due to the methodology that drives the ratings, consumers don't always have a complete and accurate picture of the quality of care being offered by the more than 4,500 hospitals nationwide noted in the CMS system. More

Clinical-supply integration (CSI) centers on ensuring that supply and device decisions reside with physicians and provides a vehicle to drive out unwarranted clinical variation. To do this, physicians must be informed by verified, accurate data. And, though data alone cannot integrate your supply chain, you cannot clinically integrate your supply chain without it. That’s because it’s the foundation of CSI and also the driver that sustains it. More

Depending on context, the word transparency has different meanings. Outside the scope of medicine, it conveys a sense of invisibility. In health care – which is built on the scientific method requiring evidence for decision-making – it bespeaks the ability to see into areas that were previously obscured. For administrators and physicians to make change to improve outcomes, they not only need data, but they also need the ability to have transparent compare groups to ensure apples-to... More

I want to dispel a common myth: the myth that there is not enough data or enough of the right data to accomplish meaningful clinical improvement. The fact is we have enough data to reach the ultimate pursuit: reducing clinical variation and improving quality at the same time. The key is having the right amount of the right data. This means having data that is transparent, comes with the ability to drill down substantially and includes comparable benchmarks. A single source of truth More