ViewPoints Blog

We have all seen the carefully constructed mission statements, whether emblazoned on a lobby plaque or posted on the website of our local hospital. The intent is usually stated clearly improving the health and wellness of the communities we serve. But are we truly meeting our mission?

The adage, "you can't manage what you can't measure," has never been more relevant in today's healthcare. With the rapid movement toward shared risk and shared savings arrangements, any successful provider must have the ability to continuously measure and monitor performance against targets and goals, turning available data into actionable information and insights.

Misconceptions - if voiced long and loudly enough - will over time be interpreted as fact. And facts are what drive decisions, whether in the boardroom or on Capitol Hill. For some time now, rural and Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) have been saddled with the notion that they are less efficient and adhere to lower standards of quality and patient satisfaction than their urban counterparts. But based on the results of our 2014 Rural Relevance Under Healthcare Reform Study released today, this notion can be challenged with empirical data.

Big data is the current buzz word in healthcare, and with good reason. Today, analytics platforms and ratings systems offer valuable insights into how healthcare providers manage patient care, cost and outcomes. There is no shortage of big data available across the healthcare landscape today; the challenge lies in effectively analyzing the data to better understand the cycle of care, implement the necessary improvements and ultimately, improve patient outcomes and keep cost low.

More than 100 nurses told us in a recent survey on nursing obstacles and inefficiencies. A ViewPoints post from iVantage's Michelle Gray Bernhardt.

The changing requirements of the New Healthcare extend far beyond operations and planning. Hospitals large and small are being forced to reexamine their security postures in response to new regulations (like the HITECH Act) and increased scrutiny around data breaches. Long gone are the days when breaches could be dealt with discreetly " nowadays, they are national events that can linger in the public's mind for months, or even years.

Today, health providers cannot afford to have their access to mission-critical data trapped behind outdated information management protocols. To see inter-relationships, often between different functions such as market, clinical, operational and financial, data is critical in order to discover and understand underlying causes and implications of problems or opportunities.

Recently I spent an afternoon with a cross-functional executive team at a community hospital. They were reviewing metrics and benchmarks from a wide variety of areas to begin tackling much needed performance improvement.