Liberate Your Healthcare Data to Create Stability in a Dynamic Environment

In health care, the role of stability is essential. Although the industry is rich with data, providers, payers, and life science companies still struggle to unlock retrospective, real-time, and predictive insights that drive decision-making in an ever-changing landscape.

A common challenge healthcare entities encounter is the inability to connect various datasets in a way that gives leaders the tools and insights to make clear, measurable progress. Leaders should be able to leverage robust technology and insights to connect disparate datasets, including third-party systems, and layer in payer-neutral data to their strategic decision-making. Absent these capabilities, organizations can fail to truly integrate workflows and empower leadership teams with targeted opportunity areas.

Essential to success is the ability to modulate marketplace turbulences and establish a trajectory that adapts and moves from disruption to decision. Premier Inc., a health care improvement company, calls this the pursuit of dynamic stability.

With the right technology and business intelligence, health care providers can make data-backed decisions that improve patient care.

When health care data sets live in a number of source systems within various service lines and departments, each department is only able to focus on what is in front of them. Leadership teams are left unable to form a holistic picture of their health system’s performance and opportunity areas. In addition, the lack of data governance structure and standardized measure definitions means that improvements enacted in one area are not necessarily in sync with other measures to improve the patient journey across the continuum.

As health systems move to having larger portions of patients on risk-based contracts, it is vital for leadership teams to have a broad view of performance in all domains (e.g., cost and quality) to achieve maximum operational efficiency. One Premier member health system – Union Health based in Terre Haute, Indiana – was challenged to enable its leaders with the clinical, operational, and financial insights to make agile decisions.

To transform its data into actionable business intelligence, in 2018, Union Health engaged Premier to begin building out a powerful analytics platform. Now, leveraging Premier’s solution, Union Health’s clinical, operational, and financial data is automatically delivered to the enterprise platform, saving time and reducing the possibility of human error. This data is cleansed and integrated, and customized algorithms are created to develop tables and visualizations that power Union Health’s progress toward its mission to provide compassionate care of the highest quality.

Today, Union Health benefits from a single source of truth, including six (and growing) automated workbooks with embedded dashboards that provide retrospective, real-time, and predictive insights that allow its analysts, executives, and directors to spend less time running reports and standardizing data – and more time implementing quality and cost improvements across their organization.

With trustworthy clinical, operational, and financial insights at their fingertips, health care providers can adapt, flex, and optimize to remain stable during market disruptions like Covid-19.

Premier member health systems are using the insights derived from their clean, standardized, integrated data to do everything from predict patient deterioration, using the most up-to-date clinical guidance, to ordering high-quality, low-cost supplies.

With hundreds of billions of data points at its fingertips, Premier’s solutions for dynamic stability extend beyond the provider, benefiting payers, self-insured employers, and life sciences companies all with the end goal of improving the quality and lowering the cost of health care. While providers further benefit from a comparative dataset that gives them access to best practices and lessons learned, other organizations can tap into Premier’s de-identified, HIPAA-compliant database for real-world evidence to guide innovation and refinement of products and services.

Learn more about how Premier can help your organization achieve dynamic stability.

Originally published in STAT on October 8, 2020.