Quality Improvement

All dashboard and no improvement?

by Trevor Strome May 16, 2012

  Improving health care is not a project In my latest article on SearchHealthIT, I make the case that the proliferation of massive reports (that nobody reads) and overpopulated dashboards in fact complicate the decision making process at many Healthcare Organizations (HCOs) and therefore lead to very little (if any) actual improvement. Improving health care is not [...]

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Is an Analytics Talent Shortage Limiting your Healthcare Improvement Potential?

by Trevor Strome May 1, 2012

The analytics talent shortage Is the potential of analytics to support change within your healthcare organization (HCO) being limited by a lack of knowledgeable and skilled analytics professionals? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the use of analytics within organizations (not just healthcare) is, and will continue to be, constrained by [...]

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Successful Healthcare Improvement Requires Analytics and Effective Communications

by Trevor Strome March 15, 2012

Effective communication is key for any quality improvement initiative Information that is “locked up” in obscure reports and complex tables or presented in ways that does not engage front-line staff is essentially a wasted resource. For healthcare improvement goals to succeed, it is important to share the process and quality improvement goals of a healthcare organization [...]

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Is it a Metric or a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?

by Sarianne Gruber February 15, 2012

[Editor's Note: This guest post is written by Sarianne Gruber of SG Analytics LLC. We are happy to welcome Sarianne as a contributor to HealthcareAnalytics.info!] Beyond the numbers – measuring the right things Indentifying appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in healthcare is not a trivial task. And when it relates to improving healthcare quality and [...]

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Integrating Analytics and Healthcare Quality Improvement Initiatives

by Trevor Strome February 13, 2012

Analytics alone isn’t the answer to improving healthcare In my recent Health IT Exchange article, I make the assertion that analytics alone cannot improve healthcare. Dashboards, scorecards, reports, and other information tools by themselves cannot change people’s practices. In order for real change to occur, it is necessary that analytic and Business Intelligence (BI) tools are applied [...]

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Five Project Management Strategies To Successfully Leverage Analytics for Healthcare Improvement

by Trevor Strome January 27, 2012

Implementing business intelligence and analytics projects within a Healthcare Organization (HCO) are challenging due to regulatory and financial pressures facing healthcare, the complexity of data involved, the multitude of stakeholders, and relative newness of BI technologies to healthcare. Below are some strategies that can help your HCO implement BI and analytics projects that become integral [...]

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Putting Analytics to Work for your Healthcare Improvement Initiatives

by Trevor Strome January 17, 2012

The number of healthcare analytics options are increasing. Some HCOs have the benefit of a large Business Intelligence (BI) or analytics platform. These stand-alone BI systems are somewhat general-purpose in nature, and operate in many industries other than healthcare. Many of these platforms are powerful indeed, with many analytics functions and features available. In addition [...]

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Ensuring health care analytics create value by understanding the requirements of information end-users

by Trevor Strome January 12, 2012

There is a proliferation of “real-time” dashboards and other information displays throughout healthcare organizations. In a recent article on information overload, I mentioned that information on reports, dashboards, and analytic tools that is not up-to date, relevant, and accurate will merely contribute to information overload. This in turn decreases the value, and use, of analytics [...]

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Healthcare Analytics – A Strategic Resource for Healthcare Quality Improvement

by Trevor Strome November 1, 2011

Analytics is changing how health care organizations (HCOs) improve clinical quality, operational efficiency and patient safety. Unfortunately, many HCOs may not be fully benefiting from the potential goldmine of useful information made possible by computerized records and analytics resources (including specialists and software) within their organizations. In my recent article posted on the Health IT Exchange, I [...]

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Advances in Healthcare IT are Improving Patient Safety

by Trevor Strome August 31, 2011

IT implementations must focus on the needs of the patient Most quality improvement approaches used in healthcare (including Lean, Six Sigma, and others) consider, if not focus on, the needs of the patient when identifying opportunities for improvement and when defining metrics for evaluating outcomes and sustainability. Importantly, as health information technology (HIT) implementation projects [...]

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