Long-term commitment and a willingness to stomach both upfront and last-mile burdens are the price of admission for millions in analytics-based cost savings and revenue enhancements.
So says Health Catalyst, a provider of data and analytics services for healthcare organizations looking to improve their clinical, financial and operational processes.
This week, during its tenth annual Healthcare Analytics Summit showcase of client success stories, the company put the spotlight on Midwest nonprofit health system UnityPoint Health and the $100 million-plus of improvements it logged over eight years and “dozens and dozens of projects” conducted alongside the tech company, Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton told Fierce Healthcare
Specifically, the 39-hospital system was able to save $41 million in costs over two years by reducing length of stay and cut spending by $32 million within a year by implementing AI-enabled care management improvements.
It also notched $31 million in average annual shared savings since 2012, saved $17.4 million in direct costs over six years by spotting and decreasing unnecessary red blood cell transfusions, and achieved a 39% relative reduction in ED visits and 54% relative reduction in inpatient admissions. Over the last seven years, the projects have maintained a benefit-cost ratio of more than 15:1, UnityPoint Health said.
“While all healthcare organizations are complex and unique, there are many efficiency opportunities that are broadly applicable across the healthcare domain,” the system told Fierce Healthcare of the applicability of its Health Catalyst projects to other providers. “Making faster, smarter decisions informed by data is relevant to all.”
For Burton, what set UnityPoint apart from other systems pursuing tech-based improvements—and where he believes his company has an advantage over other vendors and consultants—is a commitment to a data platform-based strategy both off the bat and down the line.
The organizations began their partnership with a single length of stay-focused project that required the adoption of a “light version” of Health Catalyst's data platform, he explained. Once that’s in place and pulling data from several different data sources—the EHR, an accounting system, a lab system, etc.—the company can deliver insights and help interpret the data an organization may already be viewing through its existing dashboards.
“When you layer on AI capabilities that help your human eye better understand what is an average performance, when has performance changed, what is the true outlier on the upside and the downside, what is signal and what is noise, … [analyst leaders’] 45% inaccuracy or 55% inaccuracy dramatically improves to 95% accuracy,” he explained. “That was true pervasively across hundreds of visualizations at UnityPoint.
“So in this first use case where we’re focused on one or two specific length of stay issues,” he continued, “… at an infrastructure level we’re interpreting the data correctly, not incorrectly; we’re prioritizing those elements that really do need to be changed, that our AI helps us understand—where do we have the greatest possibility for improvement, where’s the greatest likelihood of improvement.”
While investing in the infrastructure up front helps Health Catalyst make the case for future projects, it’s also a challenge for the company which initially finds itself “being compared against one of those point solution vendors, where they’re really fine-tuned to fix one problem,” Burton explained. Those competitors, as well as consulting firms, are generally lower cost that even the light version of Health Catalyst’s platform, he said.
“So we do have to upfront really share a vision that you're not going to need to just solve one problem. If you're going to survive and thrive,” he said. “There are hundreds of problems to solve and when we're successful, clients buy into that and are willing to pay a little bit more upfront.”
UnityPoint, for its part, said that it’s important for a system using analytics to evaluate improvement opportunities to “balance short-term constraints against long-term value. This perspective has helped enable the realization of significant improvement across clinical, operational, and financial domains.”
Health Catalyst has more than 600 healthcare clients, but just over 100 that the company considers to be “larger enterprise relationships” similar to UnityPoint, Burton said. Those arrangements include “meaningful data platform investment as well as apps, software and services, expertise [and] investments,” he said.
As relationships ramp up and new projects are launched, Health Catalyst needs to do some legwork to make sure stakeholders within the client organization are, and remain, on board. Here Burton gave the example of a deployment focused on sepsis rates that spots variations or nonadherence within a specific group of clinicians.
“We need to train the clinicians and persuade them that the way that they have been treating sepsis patients is not ideal, and that's where, first of all, credible data is incredibly important,” he said. Health Catalyst then pairs the data with external clinical experts “to work side-by-side with, often, the chief clinical officer or chief nursing officer … [to] persuade them to change those treatment algorithms and standardize.”
UnityPoint acknowledged that “with any change, there may be some level of internal resistance.” However, the system said that as its data and analytics functions expanded, all of its departments have come together over the shared big-picture goals of efficiency and quality improvement.
“Using these united beliefs, we have been able to work through any issues and concerns,” the system said.
Beyond overcoming “some defensiveness” among clinicians or departments, Burton said his company also needs to ensure that the C-suite or other decision-makers remain interested in launching new projects.
That’s where a combination of data documentation and the event circuit comes into play. Health Catalyst takes an active role in showcasing its clients’ successful projects at its annual Healthcare Analytics Summit (where UnityPoint was named the recipient of Health Catalyst’s “Flywheel Award”) as well as through publications and third-party shows like HIMSS, the CEO said.
That cheerleading creates more willingness within a clients’ organizations to expand the work “across more clinical areas, more financial areas, more operational areas,” he said, and motivates other organizations to try and emulate their success.
“What we find is we all want the same thing,” Burton said. “When many of our existing clients hear what a client like UnityPoint has been able to achieve with that sustained effort, we often find other clients say, ‘OK, I want to get that Flywheel Award. I want to understand what we need to do in our relationships so that we can get to more and more of those improvements, at greater and greater scale.’”