For the second year in a row, one of our innovative customers has cited work resulting from our partnership as part of their Davies award win! We are so proud of our amazing clients and their impacts on the health of their patients. Congratulations Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) on your 2017 Davies award and recognition for an “outstanding achievement of organizations that use health information technology to improve patient care while achieving cost savings.”

Situation

Starting in 2016, Prominence partnered with LVHN to tackle some exciting data challenges. With 8 hospitals and 22 health centers across eastern Pennsylvania, they were interested in expanding their use of governed data and the power of Tableau to tackle sepsis.  We were excited to share our Epic workflow knowledge, our wide experience with Sepsis analytics, and our data governance best practices through our collaboration.

Task

LVHN’s focus was to reduce sepsis mortality through process flow improvement, EHR workflow enhancement and analytics to better inform and alert care providers.  They created a large task force to review sepsis holistically and tasked Prominence to implement a successful analytics program that empowered their clinical and quality teams to measure, track, and improve the quality of care they provide for septic patients.

Action

In order to reap benefit as soon as possible, we worked with our colleagues at LVHN to identify the highest-priority measures and a subsequent timeline for augmenting analytics based on workflow and process improvements. The application:

• Was developed over 4 months
• Was built in Tableau and fed by data from their EHR
• Visualized 79 different clinical metrics
• Consumed over 5 million rows of data
• Designed based on Best Evidence, reporting requirements, and ability to review data from many perspectives
• Was designed to drill from Tableau down into actual patient record in Epic EHR to take action
• Facilitated transparency to how data is captured and defined

Result

“Analytics played a huge role in the project… The feedback loop to physicians was critical.”

– Matthew McCambridge, Chief Quality Officer

• Within days of using the Sepsis application, Lehigh’s quality department was able to identify that they only diagnosed around 20% of patients that met the clinical indications for sepsis.
• They were also able to analyze the timing between the onset, diagnosis, and treatment of sepsis for each patient to better understand where they needed to improve.
• The application saves LVHN countless hours a day that they previously spent extracting individual patient charts, looking to identify the onset and treatment of septic patients.

They identified future actionable areas to reduce the largest costs of care related to Sepsis patients (readmissions and SNF care) through having access to this critical data:

• Increase PCP continuity: 18% of members that had sepsis in 2016 had no PCP visits in the past year
• Better care coordination: Largest cost drivers throughout the care continuum after the index admission are readmissions and skilled nursing care, which is predominately provided outside of LVHN

To see more detail, check out the full case study and recording from HIMSS.