Improving the performance of any successful organization begins with a comprehensive understanding of the specific challenges it faces. With the abundance of data available in the age of analytics-driven healthcare, it would seem hospital and health systems have endless opportunities to unlock actionable insights to help advise the best clinical decisions for the patients. This is especially true in your imaging department, which gathers and utilizes masses of data, but this data is limited in ability to simplify the path to clinical decision making, to improve outcomes for patients and reduce burden to their institution.
There are often inconsistencies in the data as it come from many incomplete sources, and that data is not easily actionable for improving operational performance. Transforming this data to information to garner meaningful insights can be overwhelming, and data overload can simply lead to paralysis.
In the imaging department, we hear time and again from our customers that they would like guidance and support in validating and understanding their huge amount of data. By creating visibility to this data in a unified platform, cleaning the data to ensure its accuracy and making the information actionable, imaging departments can reliably utilize the intelligence derived from the data to drive sustainable change management for optimal operational performance.
How do you do this? At Philips, we have integrated technology, insights, benchmarking, expertise, and best-practice services to simplify our customers' data to gather valuable insights. Our PerformanceBridge Practice offering provides a customized, vendor-agnostic data platform to discover, monitor and serve imaging department's specific needs and capabilities. Our detailed assessment is the first step, gathering data to develop a baseline of operational performance. The assessment then can range from benchmarking imaging utilization, understanding imaging referral patterns, understanding drivers to improve reimbursement, helping with capital asset planning, and uncovering ways to grow revenue and reduce costs.
The assessment also includes a review of the local competitive environment, the system's footprint, the patient population and growth projections, current and projected clinical trends, and the customer's specific strategic goals. The assessment includes data cleaning and mapping after collection from many, often disparate vendor-agnostic sources to establish accuracy and reliability for reports and recommendations.
Take for example, Einstein Healthcare in Philadelphia, PA. As a private healthcare network surrounded by emerging large diagnostic imaging centers, Einstein Healthcare decided it was time to tackle their data to drive the improvement they needed to not only stay competitive but to continue to grow. But the sheer volume of information, and obtaining the right type and level of specificity of data, was overwhelming.
In partnering with Philips, Einstein underwent a preliminary assessment to identify and quantify clinical, operational and patient experience improvement opportunities.
“As our strategic partner, the ability of Philips to compute and show utilization at different sites, and turn those insights into recommendations was great,” Dr. Terence Matalon, Einstein Healthcare's chairman of diagnostic radiology, said. “I know we gave the Philips team only a very short amount of time and we were extremely pleased with the depth and quality of their work.”
Through modality and staff utilization analysis, radiology referral analysis and feedback from radiology department leadership, Philips identified root causes of key performance gaps and created several recommendations for improvement.
Regardless of an imaging department's size or capabilities, an in-depth assessment combined with our expertise and experience can enable your imaging departments' success by providing the intelligence needed to be a data-driven enterprise.
To learn more visit the Philips USA website.
