Business Intelligence: Enabling High Performance for Health Care Providers

In an environment dominated by concerns over escalating costs and quality of care, health care providers have recognized the need to significantly deliver improved outcomes and increased business excellence. To do so, they need a strategy to rise above the rest—a road map to achieve high performance and the business intelligence tools to help them monitor and track their high-performance journey.

Business intelligence can be used to measure and monitor the distinctive capabilities of high-performance providers: clinical quality, customer satisfaction, operational performance and financial longevity.

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Accenture has conducted ongoing and extensive research on the components of high performance across industries, including the health care provider industry. For most industries, it can be defined in terms of a shareholder value model: High performers consistently deliver superior returns to their shareholders through industry and economic cycles and across changes of leadership. Health care, however, is different.

The diversity of the provider market and the multitude of individual business situations within it mean that what actually constitutes high performance will vary, provider by provider. However, in all cases, high-performance value can be measured by two broad categories—improved outcomes and increased business excellence.

These two categories are further broken down into several distinctive capabilities—clinical quality, customer satisfaction, operational performance and financial longevity.

Providers can use business intelligence tools to manage business concurrently and take immediate action to address underperforming areas of the hospital and accrue the following important benefits:

• Effective measurement of performance.
• Improved agility and responsiveness to change.
• Alignment around common reporting and standards.
• Increased organizational competitiveness.

Business intelligence can be used to specifically measure and monitor the distinctive capabilities of high-performance providers: clinical quality, customer satisfaction, operational performance and financial longevity.

Clinical quality
Hospitals capture reams of clinical data every day through existing information systems. In response to growing public pressure to reduce medical errors and increase quality care, providers can use business intelligence software to assess performance. Using powerful, comparative clinical treatment and cost databases, hospitals can gather comprehensive data to track clinical performance and quality improvement initiatives and to identify trends and growth opportunities for patient care.

Customer satisfaction
Business intelligence allows a macro view of the data collection process and can report the number of instances information is recorded and the number of times errors occur due to repetitive information gathering. Market segmentation data gathered through business intelligence tools also can help hospitals cultivate relationships with patients and families over time. By creating a comprehensive log of customer interactions and by identifying important hospital customers and prospects, hospitals can create, for example, a mail-list generator for use in marketing campaigns that automatically measures return-on-investment (ROI) against campaign costs and revenue.

Operational performance
Because the majority of provider information systems are siloed, collaborative information-sharing rarely occurs using outmoded decision-support software. Business intelligence tools, however, reside on top of these systems, allowing health care executives to look into separate systems in the interest of improving workflow and increasing efficiency.

Business intelligence tools can leverage both internal and external operational and financial databases to allow hospitals and health systems to compare operational and financial performance at the system, hospital and departmental levels to control costs. Organizations can then use such comparative data to identify key opportunities in cost utilization and productivity and to set fiscal and operational benchmarks to improve performance.

Financial longevity
A business intelligence platform performs concurrent processing, so information is reported immediately. Business intelligence software extracts data from transactional systems on a more current basis, so providers can look at both historical and current information for predictive financial planning.

Business intelligence tools also can monitor timely financial indicators, such as day's outstanding receivables, and drill into clinical product or service line information to determine how a certain program is performing. These tools can drive a hospital's financial performance by helping it determine financial outcomes in a timely manner.

Several important industry trends will impact business intelligence functions as health care organizations increasingly adopt this new tool set, including:

• Emergence of new clinical programs and new models to deliver and manage health care that make a consolidated view of outcomes and operating results difficult for many providers.
  
  
• Increasing medical costs that make it harder for patients to afford quality care.
  
  
• Changes in compensation models driven by pay-for-performance that create new requirements for data capture within clinical and administrative workflow and the ability to aggregate and report outcomes against key performance indicators.
  
  
• Advances in information processing infrastructure that creates the potential for greater information analysis, which is difficult to harness in practice.
  
  
• An increasing need for data sharing across health care applications and entities and incorporating health care data from many sources.
  
  
• Heightened focus on consumer health care information, both in terms of transparency initiatives and privacy and security requirements.

While other industries have embraced business intelligence to advance reporting, planning and operational decision-making, health care providers are behind the curve in adopting and using this technology. Hospitals that embrace this diagnostic tool set can gain a competitive advantage for achieving and sustaining high performance.

Accenture can help health care providers integrate business intelligence tools to transform data into actionable information that helps them better measure, manage and improve how they do business. To this end, providers create a list of parameters to monitor and compare with established benchmarks to measure high performance. This list of measures can be compiled into an executive dashboard to show on a timely basis how a hospital is performing on key performance indicators, such as quality, customer satisfaction, operations and financials. These high-performance health care organizations will, in turn, drive business growth, manage costs more effectively and deliver higher levels of quality care.

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