From Excel to Performance Dashboards

picture
Abhinav Shashank
Tue 24 Jan 2017
Share this blog:
hero_section

Healthcare systems constantly find themselves looking for ways to measure and sustain their growth. Back in the day, with the traditional static reporting models, at least 80% of the entire time was spent looking for data, rather than deriving meaning out of it. Even then, the flat files that held the data required clinicians to sift through it and analyze it, and ultimately, rely on their perception over objective data points – a far cry from a value-based care world.

To identify these inconsistencies, monitor a system’s performance, and discover areas for improvements, health systems need a dashboard. Datashop, with its state-of-the-art dashboarding module, understands these needs and comes with visually interactive and healthcare-specific dashboards.

Why do health systems need dashboards?

Healthcare dashboards are extremely critical for a healthcare system to gain quick and actionable insights, and dashboards are an easy way to find answers to a provider’s questions in a comprehensive way along with many factors:

  • A consolidated, visual view: It’s easier for healthcare providers to track a patient’s well-being by looking at a measure going green or red rather than manually analyzing the trends.
  • An awareness of population health trends: Dashboards allow clinicians and care teams to take in a holistic view of patient population and make valuable strategic and health decisions at the right time.
  • Monitoring variations: By using dashboards, care providers can narrow down on the reasons behind a patient’s falling health, find the treatments that worked best, and reducing these variations. 
  • Tracking efficiency and growth: With dashboards, healthcare providers can monitor their growth measures and find the outcomes of the improvement measures they drove. 

Challenges health systems face

Even after realizing the shortcomings and inefficiencies of a static reporting system, and despite the willingness of health systems to switch to dashboards, there are some substantial barriers:

  • Development of performance measures (PMs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): In order to obtain results-oriented outcomes and implement improvement measures, the KPIs should be in line with the health system’s goals and dashboards should be able to provide the ability to measure, monitor and analyze their attainment.
  • Ensuring Data quality from multiple sources: The data in healthcare is spread across various sources and their identification is a major issue when it comes to developing dashboards. Since data comes from multiple sources and is often not standardized, poor data quality hinders the maximum utilization of dashboards and produces incoherent results.
  • Aligning dashboards to source systems: It is a challenge for IT systems to capture data from incoherent sources, integrate these data points, design an architecture for dashboards, and develop the best query language for these data structures.
  • Presenting data: After analyzing the data, it needs to be presented on the dashboard complete with visual and functional features to improve cognition and interpretation. A dashboard is effective only if it is equipped with functional features, real-time alerts, and interactiveness to provide clinicians with a detailed view in a compact manner.
  • Tracking performance: Given the amount of data related to a health care organizations, there are enormous challenges in monitoring the performance of such a network. It is of paramount importance that the organization is able to track the performance on multiple payer contracts from aggregate level drilled down to provider/facility level.

Why Datashop’s performance dashboards?
With a clear definition of KPIs, a rich collection of data analytics, and a visually-interactive dashboard, Datashop has developed Datashop Insights that puts every important information out in the open for organizations to work towards their goals and optimize their objectives.

Datashop’s dashboards following critical features:

  • Easily accessible: Datashop’s dashboards can be shared across users in and out of the network so that every user can access the dashboard and the relevant information needed to tap into insights.
  • Consistent, reliable data: Corrective measures can only be taken if the data available to providers is reliable. Since Datashop aggregates, cleans and normalizes data into a single source of truth, providers can have access to validated and compact data.
  • Updated data: Since Datashop can integrate data from more than 50 EMR systems, as well as claims, users can have access to updated data as the ones coming from EMRs are easily three months ahead of the claims. This allows timely and updated report generation on providers’ performance.
  • A constant review of benchmarks and trends: Datashop regularly monitors a health systems trends to help providers learn about where they are going. Datashop’s predictive analytics project immediate effects and providers can learn if they are making the right efforts in the right direction.
  • Involves end-users: Datashop’s dashboards are easy to use and understand with important measures laid out in a card-like fashion. Moreover, Datashop allows users to build their own, DIY dashboards, with the measures they wish to see using a dashboard builder; or customize one with their choice of measures.
  • Drilled Down Contract Performance Dashboard: Datashop equips care teams to track drilled  down contract performance from an aggregate level drilled down to facility/provider level.

How Datashop counters the challenges organizations face?

Datashop’s performance dashboards are linked with an integrated data lake that ingests data from multiple sources regardless of their structure, standardizes the data from several sources, and cleans it. A high-quality data is then obtained and used on the performance dashboards to generate coherent and updated results.

By giving providers the autonomy on the measures they wish to track and analyze, these performance dashboards helps health systems identify their KPIs and itself perform the task of measuring, monitoring and analyzing growth or inadequacies. Using the customized and DIY dashboards, providers can avoid unnecessary cluttering and just narrow their attention to a few, but key measures.

Plus, the dashboard is built on a point-and-click interface where users can access their chosen measures by just pointing to it. Each measure is summarized and color-coded into cards, which expand to give a detailed view and cognition. These performance dashboards are built with real-time alerts and notifications to help clinicians focus on the immediate need of the patients, watch the impact of measures they take, and change the course of action if needed.  

Improving outcomes with performance dashboards

“One can’t improve what one can’t measure.”

Healthcare, dynamic as it is, is constantly changing and evolving. On the road to value-based care, many methods have to be overhauled, technology has to be revamped, and quality has to be improved. To narrow down on these areas of improvement, health systems need to constantly measure and monitor their growth, which is changing at an unprecedented rate. Datashop’s balanced and updated performance dashboards are interactive and with the right data, health systems can learn the invaluable information their data holds, find the areas for improvements, plan clinical interventions, watch their costs, and deliver true value-based care. Performance dashboards are just one more way of ensuring quality and creating a value chain in healthcare.

For more updates, Subscribe

If you want to see our efforts in the area, schedule a quick demo.

Recommended

See the industry’s most advanced decision support system

Get an overview of the most advanced Health Cloud built to help healthcare care as one.
Tags: Datashop, Healthcare
picture
Abhinav Shashank
From Excel to Performance Dashboards
REQUEST A DEMO

Accelerate Your Digital Transformation with the Innovaccer Health Cloud

Request a free demo of the #1 healthcare data platform to know how you can generate millions in savings just like our superhero customers.

errorhi there

errorhi there

errorhi there