Athens Regional Health System case study

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Five Ways Small BI Projects Can Make A Big DifferenceAthens Regional Health System

Case Study


Athens Regional Health System

350-bed regional referral hospital in northeast Georgia

Level II trauma center, Level III neonatal intensive care unit, and four urgent care centers as well as a physicians’ practice group

Solution: Diver Platform

Quick Facts


Athens Regional Health System

Athens Regional Health System is an award-winning hospital, named one of Healthgrades’ “America’s 100 Best Hospitals” in 2016.

Athens Regional has been using The Diver Platform since 2009, and is constantly looking for new ways to use Diver to enable better decision-making.

This presentation highlights five small Diver projects making a big difference at Athens Regional.

Background


1. Readmissions vs. Returns

Athens Regional wanted to gain a better understanding of emergency department readmissions (those people who came through the emergency department and then returned to the hospital within 48 hours as an inpatient).

The readmissions data was limited to only people who were admitted as inpatients, but Diver’s flexibility allowed Athens Regional to change the definitions to get the numbers the emergency department wanted.

They were also proactive, expanding definitions in anticipation of the next question that might be asked: when does the observation patient come back and get readmitted?


2. Chest Pain Unit Metrics

Objective Challenge SolutionAthens Regional Health System was accredited as a chest pain center in 2013.

The chest pain unit needed to take steps to define what they meant by a low risk acute coronary syndrome patient.

Diver was able to join all of the data correctly and produce the upload file and metrics the chest pain unit needed.

When the chest pain unit wanted to reach the next level of accreditation with the Society of Cardiovascular Patient Care (SCPC), the hospital used Diver to help get there.

They needed to provide a file to submit data to the SCPC once a month.

This, despite the fact that all of the data the chest pain unit needed was kept in three different systems, including one that was a free-text field that was challenging for searches.

They needed to create a dashboard to show that the unit was looking at trends in care and that they were following certain guidelines.

The result: the chest pain unit rose to the top tier of accreditation without hours of manual data entry, and it was able to analyze trends and cut the length of stay in half for the observation patients


3. Lab Turnaround Times

Athens Regional wanted to decrease the amount of time required for the lab to produce troponin test turnaround reports.

ProDiver helped the hospital go from a time-consuming process to delivering the data more quickly.

This allowed the hospital to: Look at which units got results back

quickest Identify which units took longest

and investigate why


4. Quick and Easy File Creation

Athens Regional Health System frequently uses the file creation aspect of Diver.

In one example, the materials department wanted a freight report in which the goals were: – To capture all of the freight associated with the

hospital’s purchase orders– To create a file to send to an outsourcing vendor

The hospital used Integrator, Dimensional Insight’s ETL tool, to find the records to include in the file, and then used a trace object to send the files off.


5. Workload Graphs

Athens Regional used Diver to help figure out how to reduce labor expense, particularly in the lab.

The hospital used ProDiver to look at when and how much work was being done with lab samples, and used that information to produce graphics showing peak work times, which they used to structure the lab schedule.


Learn More

To learn more, including how Athens Regional

Health System plans to use Diver next, visit:

http://www.dimins.com/case-studies/athens-regional-case-study/






Healthcare

Athens Regional Health System case study