What are some real examples of how data is driving positive outcomes?
Our access to financial data is much faster than in the past, so we can pivot daily on financial decisions. We’ve improved patients’ ability to schedule appointments, which has led to a 30% productivity gain. The number-one revenue generator in health systems is OR time, and we have 400 ORs. We can use analytics to show the turnaround times for specific doctors. We know, for example, that Dr. Smith, who is coming in at noon, likes the bed with the head near the door, which is not our standard practice. If we don’t get that right, and the head is at the other end, she walks in, throws her hands in the air, and says, “I’ll be back in 20 minutes,” which costs us around $10K. The ability to leverage data to understand and plan for those behaviors is extremely important.
How did you improve the organization’s data literacy?
Once we set up a data architecture that provides data liquidity, where data can go everywhere, we had to teach people how to use it. We provided basic dashboards like length of stay and patient utilization, and suggested they look at them every day.
That’s the first part of data literacy: here’s the data we have. Is it helpful to you? Right away, you get 60% of people nodding their heads. The 10% who are PhD researchers want the keys to the kingdom, and we’ll make that work for them, but our first step was to get our staff to work with the data we have.
Once we established basic data literacy, we taught people some advanced data practices and trained them on our tools. My data team no longer spends 90% of their day doing pivot tables. Our workforce is doing that themselves. Staff also shares data and builds new data sets for each other. Now that they’re thirsty for it, we’re all using data more to solve problems. Data value has become a crowdsourced entity.
