At the Becker's Hospital Review Annual Meeting in Chicago on May 9, 2013, Chief Analytics Officer for Press Ganey David Costello, PhD, gave a presentation titled "Advanced Analytics and its Role in Transforming Health Care." "It's important to understand the role of health analytics because there are jobs and careers made on it, and winners and losers in the market because of it," said Dr. Costello. "They can help you understand how to predict particular outcomes. Information coupled with analytics can solve problems, and solving a series of problems can help you solve the big picture."
Analytics can address healthcare business questions, but it isn't enough just to create the data dashboards and reports; hospital leaders must understand what the data says and how to apply strategy that will fix the problem.
"It's built on top of descriptive statistics, means and correlations," said Dr. Costello. "Models are applied to inform better decision-making and understand what to do next. You should have some prioritization and do predictive analytics. I don't want people to tell me what they should have done; tell me what is going to happen. This is critical because once I understand that, I can do simulations that tell me how outcomes could change."
These analytics could be applied to a number of different issues, including optimizing overall hospital ratings or nurse communication, bed utilization, length of time between arriving at the emergency room and seeing a doctor, or other initiatives. Figuring out how to operate more efficiently and effectively can make the hospital more financially successful as well.
"The real question is why didn't we do this 15 years ago," said Dr. Costello. "If you think about other industries, such as financial services, retail or packaged goods, they make their money on the margins; they make their money on the 1 percent change that really affects their business. What separates the winners and losers is the ability to understand their customers. Hospitals must have the ability to understand their patients more than anyone else, and analytics will transform opportunities in the market place."
While it's important to drive patient satisfaction and hospital ratings, those changes could impact the success of other hospital departments. Understand the source of different issues at the hospital and how change affects other areas.
"I can drive up patient satisfaction and hospital ratings by discharging more patients home, but I may also be driving up readmission rates," said Dr. Costello. "Silos rule the world and you are not going to break those down tomorrow organization-wise, but you can break it down data-wise. Break down the silo barriers by understanding things like how financials impacts throughput to the ER and how length of stay impacts patient satisfaction. I can bring those together and create a unified view of the patient that is layered deep because I have a firm understanding of who the patient is."
Dr. Costello also discussed data management and using the right statistical technique:
• Text analytics — capturing the voice of the patient
• Decision tree analytics — identifying key non-controllable patient drivers
• Logistic modeling — targeting the right improvement opportunities
• Decision tree analytics — turning the lens to focus attention on the physicians
"Make improvements one area at a time, but start now because if we don't start today, we won't get into the future," said Dr. Costello. "Text analytics is going to blossom over the next few years. This whole concept of emotional analysis is going to be really big."
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