How Frederick Memorial Hospital Improved Performance Metrics Through Data Visualization and Analytics

For Frederick Memorial Hospital, discovering an easier method to visualize data was a main priority. Their search began with creating a model that would organize and visualize data into a functioning, user-friendly tool. These needs would lead to the involvement of Aculyst.

“Our search committee appreciated the powerful visualizations that Aculyst products provided and their existence as a pre-built tested data model that had been applied in a large healthcare system for a number of years,” said Frederick Memorial Hospital. Aculyst’s powerful visualizations stem from its ability to crystallize KPI’s into user-friendly dashboards and distill complex healthcare data into a pre-built data model to serve all business and clinical units. Systems and spreadsheets can be organized to fit a data model that aids in strategic decision support and provides cutting edge healthcare analytics. Overall, Aculyst can be quickly implemented and offers a lucrative ROI.

Discovery

Prior to using Aculyst, Frederick Memorial staff tediously inserted data into Excel sheets. As demand grew for data presented in a visualized format, the hospital turned to Business Intelligence as a solution. There was an initial attempt to use a visualization tool set to create a new model. However, due to the project’s time requirement, hospital staff resorted to employing an existing model already in use.

“Aculyst stood out for a number of reasons. Mainly, it utilized Tableau as a visualization front instead of a proprietary front end. The idea was that if we had Aculyst performing R&D on its data model and Tableau responsible for visualization techniques, it would result in a better use of input expenditures,” said Frederick Memorial Hospital. Andy Dé, industry strategy and marketing leader for healthcare and life sciences at Tableau commented, “The ability to empower physicians, nurses and clinicians on the front line of care delivery with the actionable insights they need for life- impacting decisions is critical for enabling higher quality of care and superior patient outcomes. Frederick Memorial Hospital is at the forefront of this innovation and we are delighted to partner with them and Aculyst on this journey.”

According Frederick Memorial Hospital, the facility was designed to serve the local population. It contains around 300 active beds, a robust provider network of physicians, and has the largest PCP population in the region. Aculyst has proven to be instrumental in helping Frederick Memorial Hospital serve the needs of the community.

Benefits & Solutions

Aculyst provides teams a clear association between performance metrics and the hospital’s objectives, while presenting quality measures and clinical outcomes in one system. Team members can tailor their efforts toward creating value and be confident that the hospital is on target to meet its goals.

The main components of Aculyst that are being implemented at Frederick Memorial include emergency services, admissions and discharges for inpatients and outpatients, OR management system, time and attendance metrics, and core quality measures. Benchmark targets are currently being developed for teams to compare performance in relation to peer groups.

Frederick Memorial staff have been able to use Aculyst to draw conclusions and effectively highlight disparities simply through data visualization. Prior to implementing Aculyst, hospital staff were working on a detailed data extraction around observing patients in order to discover why some patients had lengthier stays. Once it was possible to visualize the data from these observations instead of manually creating charts and graphs, Frederick Memorial staff were able to start developing strategies.

Another benefit of interacting with the dashboards is the ease and simplicity involved in searching for relevant data. The use of these dashboards will allow the FMH team to truncate 3-4 day strategy meetings. Meetings will now focus on Catalyst dashboards in order to discuss important questions and quickly analyze data from various time periods. “I want us to have new data incorporated into our questions. I don’t want the discussion questions to simply be a reconstruction of the data we already have,” said an FMH staff member.

Outlook

Aculyst delivers organization level solutions that create daily awareness of trends and variances that are not visible today. By linking operations, finance, quality and staffing, executives and managers can now intervene with confidence on cost overruns, avoid bottlenecks and increase patient satisfaction and safety with improved information.

One of the main goals of Aculyst is to get useful data into the hands of clinicians, doctors, nurses, and knowledge workers. According to Frederick Memorial Hospital, there will eventually be around 80-100 employees, mainly in analytic and strategic roles, who will have full interactivity with Aculyst. In addition, several hundred physicians will have access to specialized dashboards during their shifts.

Aculyst’s integration of data and the delivery of analytics are designed to serve business decision makers in both service lines as well as nursing units. The intent is to also permit at least 15-20% of nurses, who would split their clinical time between leading the clinical field and patient care, access to actionable data. Providing access to data would allow nurses to demonstrate new mandatory practices and protocols to fellow surgeons and physicians..