Four Strategies Drive High-Value Healthcare Analytics for COVID-19 Recovery

Four Strategies
Drive High-Value
Healthcare Analytics
for COVID-19
Recovery
HEALTH CATALYST EDITORS

© 2020 Health Catalyst
Proprietary. Feel free to share but we would appreciate a Health Catalyst citation.
This article is based on a HAS 20 Virtual breakout presentation by John
Wadsworth, MS, Senior Vice President, Client Engagement, Health Catalyst,
titled, “’Bellagio Buffet’ Analytics: Necessary for COVID Recovery.”
Machine Learning Tools Unlock Critical Insights
John Wadsworth, MS
Senior Vice President
Client Engagement

Healthcare Analytics for COVID-19 Recovery
COVID-19 is challenging existing
assumptions around the business of
healthcare analytics, as the demand
for high-quality and timely population-
level data has never been so urgent.
From emergency response to a
sustainable pandemic-ready future,
analytics-informed decision making is
a short- and long-term operational,
clinical, and financial imperative.

However, established analytics
practices that don’t accommodate the
current dynamic state of healthcare
won’t scale to meet the COVID-19
era’s fluid needs.
Healthcare organizations must
assess how they run their analytics
teams and adopt critical system-level
competencies to elevate analytic
production and consumption.

Health systems that meet pandemic
pressures with high-value analytics will
not only operate effectively in the current
crisis but emerge better equipped to
leverage analytics resources to improve
care delivery in the long term.

COVID-19 Recovery Is Revolutionizing the
Production of Healthcare Analytics
Lessons learned from the pandemic’s
acute phases, emerging operational
challenges, and outbreak-driven changes
in revenue are placing greater value on
analytics as healthcare approaches
COVID-19 recovery.
As a result, the pandemic is revolutionizing
the way health systems run their analytic
businesses.

The pandemic has driven greater
recognition that an analytics business
must offer operational transparency
and timeliness as a key to survival.
Analytics will also play a critical role in
identifying new revenue streams, and
analytics teams facing furloughs,
layoffs, and budget cuts will establish
their value by identifying and
validating these new streams.

Additionally, the producers and consumers of
analytics within organizations are changing.
Analytics team members best equipped
to survive disruptions are skilled domain
operators with tech savvy knowledge-
sharing capabilities.

Even though any role not touching a patient
directly (e.g., data scientists and engineers)
is a candidate for outsourcing, organizations
tend to recognize the value of people who
can stitch together outcomes and finance
and know the value of operations and the
interplay with finance.

The analytics team will thrive in the
COVID-19 era by recognizing that
value-creation is at the intersection of
organizational branches (e.g., opera-
tions and finance, operations and
clinical outcomes, and clinical
outcomes and finance) and producing
analytics to serve these junctures.

The Pitfall of Healthcare Analytics
Business Model Assumptions
Leveraged well, analytics plays a central
operational role by helping organizations
generate revenue, decrease cost, and improve
outcomes. However, two common mistakes
thwart the value of analytics offerings:
Underestimating the effort required to capture an
opportunity: There is often a disconnect between healthcare
leadership and the analytics team around understanding
analytic capability to capture an opportunity for improvement.
Overestimating analytic consumers’ capabilities: Analytics
teams tend to overestimate how well non-technical team
members can interpret and act on analytic insights.
1
2

The principles above fall short of optimizing
analytics by assuming a high degree of
technical knowledge among all team
members seeking analytics.
But if an organization aims to leverage data
across all systems, it needs to make its data
analytics process accessible to non-technical
roles who need data to improve their
workflows and outcomes (e.g., clinical,
financial, and leadership).

An effective analytics business
model for the COVID-19 era
considers the value of the analytics
experience across the organization,
regardless of technical expertise.

Four Strategies for High-Value
To best leverage data and analytics roles
through COVID-19 recovery, healthcare
organizations must establish their
analytics strategy’s value.
A successful approach to the analytics
business includes understanding the
varied needs of the communities they
serve (meaning the masses, not an
influential few leaders) and adds value
throughout the health system.

To provide valuable insights, analytics
producers need to understand the
business of providing care and the
value of analytics to their organization.
According to the healthcare opportunity
value continuum (Figure 1), not all
analytics are equal, and not all
analytics hold the same value
(especially at the system level).

Figure 1: The healthcare opportunity value continuum.

The following four strategies will help
health systems realize the most value
from their analytics offerings:
1. Minimize Benchmarking
2. Outsource Regulatory Reporting
3. Grow Risk-Based Stratification
4. Find the Ideal State: Activity-Based
Costing plus At-Risk Contracting

#1: Minimize Benchmarking
At the bottom of the value continuum,
benchmarking, with limited data sets,
offers low visibility into needed workflow
changes. Analytics teams need to
minimize benchmarking.
Too many health systems employ report
writers who spend days hunting for data,
which doesn’t improve outcomes or
lower costs.

#1: Minimize Benchmarking
By minimizing benchmarking, analytics
departments free up technical resources to
focus on higher-value analytics offerings
(e.g., outcomes improvement).
Ideally, a health system will spend less
than two percent of its analytic budget
on benchmarking.

#2: Outsource Regulatory Reporting
The next step up in value is regulatory
reporting, which gives more visibility into
workflow changes than benchmarking
but bases measurement on decades-old
evidence-based medicine.
Given its low position on the value
scale, regulatory reporting is a
candidate for outsourcing.

#2: Outsource Regulatory Reporting
Partnering with companies that do regulatory
reporting more efficiently than in-house teams
gives health systems more capacity to invest in
analytics resources, growing the analytic ability
to better understand the organization.
External regulatory partners can also build
reusable content that many areas, including
executive leadership, can leverage.

#3: Grow Risk-Based Stratification
Risk-based stratification lands high on the
value continuum by providing clinically-
stratified populations to maximize the
payer mix (the percentage of patients with
government health plans versus
commercial or “private” insurance).
This includes at-risk reimbursement.
Analytics at the risk-based stratification
level gives insight into the business drivers
behind analytics requests.

For example, ACO leadership needs to
understand the aggregate clinical patient
population to set per-member-per-month
rates with payers.
Health system leaders must understand
the varied needs of a community to
ensure care is available and affordable
for the masses.

Analytics teams will fare well by growing
their risk-based stratification capabilities by
investing in analytic talent capable of
producing risk-based analytics (e.g., team
members with both technical and care
delivery business savvy).
Risk-based stratification is also a good
area for consulting help, including hiring
partners for data literacy and data-driven
strategic consulting on population health,
clinically integrated networks (CINs),
ACOs, and new revenue streams.

#4: Find the Ideal State: Activity-Based
Costing plus At-Risk Contracting
At the highest value for health systems,
analytics for activity-based costing (ABC)
and its associated costing transparency,
coupled with the benefits of risk-based
stratification, makes costing easily
accessible and understandable among
providers and patients.
When organizations combine an ABC
solution (e.g., the Health Catalyst
CORUS™ Suite) with risk-based
stratification, analytics achieves its
highest value and drives meaningful
improvement.

Embracing a Mindset Shift Around Analytics
COVID-19 is influencing leadership and
organizational mindset shifts around analytics,
as emergency demands and changes in
revenue stream drive greater reliance on
analytic insights into workflow changes.
To further the high-value role of analytics,
organizations must understand data
challenges and risks, invest in partnerships
to mitigate that risk and prioritize practices
that make data widely available across
organizations.

Embracing a Mindset Shift Around Analytics
In the COVID-19 recovery landscape,
analytics transcends benchmarking and
regulatory reporting and becomes a critical
business strategy.

For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

More about this topic
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
Four Strategies Drive High-Value Healthcare Analytics for COVID-19 Recovery
How Data Transforms the Hospital Command Center to Pandemic Proportions
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David Gardiner, MBA, MHA, MPH, Senior VP and Executive Advisor
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Integrated Data and Analytics Critical for COVID-19 Response and Recovery Planning
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Holly Rimmasch, Chief Clinical Officer; Ed Corbett, MD, Medical Officer
Anne Marie Bickmore, Senior VP, Company Operation

Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing, analytics and outcomes-improvement
company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes improve clinical, financial, and operational
outcomes needed to improve population health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data
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to forward-thinking physician practices.
Health Catalyst was recently named as the leader in the enterprise healthcare BI market in
improvement by KLAS, and has received numerous best-place-to work awards including Modern
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Four Strategies Drive High-Value Healthcare Analytics for COVID-19 Recovery

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Four Strategies Drive High-Value Healthcare Analytics for COVID-19 Recovery