A Data Integration Success Story
Healthcare organizations face significant challenges in treating diverse patient populations while meeting extensive data and reporting needs. A health system’s Stroke/Neurosciences team, dealing with the complexities of stroke care and challenges to maintain compliance with the AHA’s Get with The Guidelines® (GWTG) program, sought assistance from their Analytics department.
GWTG-Stroke is an in-hospital program to improve stroke care by promoting adherence to the latest scientific treatment guidelines. For a hospital to participate and remain certified for GWTG-Stroke, it must share data on patient demographics, clinical events, treatments, processes, and outcomes. Over one hundred required
and dozens of optional data points related to each stroke patient must be shared with the AHA at least quarterly. The Analytics department engaged Impact Advisors to streamline the formerly manual and time-consuming process of chart abstraction and tracking in spreadsheets
“The dedication and support from Impact Advisors equipped our team with the tools to identify real-time opportunities for enhancing patient care… The dedication and expertise from Impact Advisors not only drove process improvements in patient care but also streamlined our workflow, allowing us to focus on initiatives that had previously been stalled due to the labor-intensive task of manual data collection."
Impact Advisors' Solution
Impact Advisors engaged diverse leaders, clinicians, analytics, and IT team members, employing agile project management principles to develop innovative data and analytics solutions. This included a new Stroke data mart encompassing hundreds of thoroughly curated and documented data elements, along with over a dozen new efficient and intuitive analytics tools and reports. The team also standardized various new and existing EMR workflows as part of the implementation of a comprehensive data integration solution. The initiative paved the way for hospital staff and leaders to respond more easily and confidently to clinical, business, and other ad-hoc questions and challenges, where data can be a catalyst for addressing these issues.
Results
Impact Advisors’ approach led to significant and unanticipated benefits beyond addressing the GWTG challenges. For example, one of the key metrics for the project focused on Patient Arrival to Thrombolytic Administration Time, a critical window for a patient experiencing acute ischemic stroke to receive thrombolytic therapy, helping restore blood flow to the brain as soon as possible. Improvement across four key performance metrics are shown to the right.
Additional benefits:
- Enhanced clinical decision-making
- Decreased manual chart data abstraction and collection time
- Improved ability to respond to ongoing reporting requirements, including ad-hoc regulatory requests
- Increased clinician time at the bedside
- Improved post-discharge patient follow-up process and compliance
“Thank you for equipping the neurosciences team with the tools to improve patient outcomes. Your leadership has had a profound impact on our team’s employee satisfaction.”
Impact Advisors’ solution demonstrated the potential for data integration to transform healthcare delivery. This project enabled the Stroke team to reallocate critical time (an estimated time savings of 75 hours per month) to direct patient care, leading to improved patient follow-up processes, outcomes, and reporting capabilities.