Improving the quality of patient care is the highest priority for healthcare professionals. Healthcare providers and administrators also need to manage costs, adjust services, achieve compliance, and reduce wait times for ER and critical procedures. Healthcare data is wide-ranging and real-time.
The transition to electronic health records (EHR) means the healthcare industry has been faced with moving huge amounts of data from paper files to electronic records. This has been driven by a number of factors; the need for healthcare organizations to drive down costs and enable them to share confidential patient information between hospitals, clinics, and physician practices. The advances in health information technology (HIT) and the adoption of mobile devices has enabled remote medical professionals to access electronic health records and systems that accelerate the provision of high-quality care to patients and reduce treatment times.
Ensuring the security of confidential patient health information is paramount as more and more patient data is shared and transferred between healthcare providers and medical institutions. Comprehensive compliance regulations have been introduced in North America to govern how organizations collect, use, and disclose personal information and protect the privacy of individuals. Examples of these are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada. Institutions handling or storing patient records have to demonstrate ongoing compliance against this legislation and face stiff financial penalties for any unauthorised disclosure of private, personal information.
Data warehousing (DW) initiatives and business intelligence (BI) software has enabled research, physician, nursing staff, and administrator access to data from all sorts of systems. Top healthcare organizations use business analytics software to aggregate and render the data in a way that provides insight and awareness. Delivering real-time, accurate, and actionable information via focused KPIs further enables decisions to be made that are based on current information and helps health care providers to review trends, predict outcomes, and manage patients, staff, and costs.
A KPI dashboard is an important tool that ensures that key metrics are available to front-line staff in a format that is relevant and easily understood. For example, physicians making ward rounds can view KPIs using a wireless mobile device. At a nurses station, a KPI dashboard on a PC desktop can display KPIs about patient and bed allocation. For public areas, such as A&E waiting rooms, key performance indicators (like wait times) can be communicated using large flat panel displays. And for administrators and planners, a KPI dashboard can consolidate many of the operational metrics they need, saving time, every day.
Klipfolio has worked with leading healthcare providers, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, OsteoMed, Baxter Healthcare, and William Osler Health System, to provide real-time notification and threshold-based alerts that are clear, concise, and role-specific, ensuring that changes in any key performance indicators will never go unnoticed.
KPIs, Dashboards and Operational Metrics: The 10 Guidelines.
