The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)
SickKids embarked on a multi-year program to develop a scalable analytics ecosystem and infrastructure platform to support achievement of its 5-year strategic plan.
Challenge:
A review of the organization’s current data ecosystem found volumes of structured and unstructured, highly variable data. Disparate systems also made data hard to find, retrieve, and link together for clinical, research, or operational purposes.
Solution:
Impact Advisors’ assessment and the resulting proposed analytics roadmap focused on three pillars: People, Process, and Technology/Tools.
Key elements of the 18-month roadmap included:
• Creation of an integrated platform to enhance data access and availability
• Development of foundational analytics architecture
• Expansion of data governance and related structures
• Build out of a data quality program
• An implementation plan for meeting all Year 1 use case goals
• A total-cost-of-ownership model including an exploration of cloud vs. on-premise data storage
Impact:
The analytics roadmap is being deployed. Goals of the roadmap include:
• A data platform and single source of accurate, validated data
• Ability to transfer data between applications and manipulate and
display data easily to look for correlations (analytical and predictive
capability)
• Enabled capacity planning; integration of social determinants of health
data
• Practical and affordable storage of large data sets
Lee Health
One of the largest public health systems in the U.S., consisting of four acute care hospitals (1,879 beds), two specialty hospitals, and Lee Physician Group (750+ primary and specialty care physicians).
Challenge:
In 2017, CMS penalized Lee Health $7M for excess infection rates, giving the organization a 2-Star rating for overall hospital quality—an unpleasant surprise to Lee’s
leadership, who had been celebrating the organization’s 10% decrease in infection rates. Like many health systems, Lee suffered from too much data, no visibility to external benchmarks, and not enough actionable insights. Other challenges included lack of analytics alignment to strategic objectives and lack of accountable analytics
leadership.
Solution:
In response and guided by Impact Advisors’ experienced advisors, Lee Health developed a roadmap focused on evolving organizational mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets to deliver actionable insights and more business value from analytics.
Key components of the roadmap included:
• Establishing an Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) designed to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across domains to support strategic objectives and build trust in analytics teams
• Implementing analytics governance with clear accountabilities, data owners and stewards
• Developing an enterprise data architecture strategy and plan
• Leveraging a core subset of existing technology, supplementing with a centralized method of integrating, and creating a single visualization layer
• Utilizing data-driven insights to continually refine prioritization of analytics projects
Impact:
Lee Health’s analytics journey has been transformational. In less than three years, the organization reversed its quality and safety performance, earning financial incentives and a 5-Star rating from CMS. In 2021, Lee Health was named among US News and World Report’s “Best Regional Hospitals.”
“Lee Health has been on a journey over the past several years to improve our data and analytics function to provide insightful, actionable information that leads to effective and efficient decision-making. While this is a continuous journey of improvement, we have at this point achieved a level of improvement that is proving significant value to our C-suite.”
Baptist Healthcare
A non-profit health system that includes three hospitals, four medical parks, Andrews Institute for Orthopedic & Sports Medicine and a large network of primary care and specialty physicians.
Challenge:
BHC was dealing with the problem of getting data out of their EHR and trying to establish a formal analytics strategy. BHC was also starting to explore using artificial
intelligence (AI) with external vendors.
Solution:
Most organizations have an abundance of data, but many lack a defined strategy for enabling the use of data to make better and more timely decisions. Impact Advisors worked side-by-side with the BHC team to assess its current use of analytics, set a goal for improvement, and develop a roadmap to get there.
Key activities:
• Evaluated the analytics team structure and capabilities, leading to the implementation of an Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) and recruitment of full-time resources
to implement and manage the ACE and the overall analytics program
• Implemented a data governance model at the enterprise level to align analytics with business and strategic priorities
• Addressed prioritized analytics use cases, including a project focused on centralizing data and standardizing and automating processes associated with validating billing for contract labor across three facilities
Impact:
The Analytics Center of Excellence with new leadership will allow BHC to manage their analytics program internally, and the development of a strategic data governance model will help to ensure BHC’s future success. Currently, several analytics use case projects are being implemented, including use of automation where it will help drive efficiencies and reduce errors. BHC is also beginning the next step in its analytics maturity process, which is to create a standard, curated data foundation to be used across the organization for better insights and day-to-day operational decisions, helping to break down silos.
“Impact Advisors listened and took the time to ensure they fully understood our unique issues and current pressures. Their skill and experience enabled them to complete analytics projects effectively and efficiently. Each resource that Impact Advisors brought to the account was there to add value."