Healthcare Analytics: Fighting the Good Fight

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Advanced analytics are transforming healthcare operations and patient care. Nevada’s Renown Health is leading the way, creating a roadmap for swift and effective change.

We are witnessing a transformative revolution in healthcare, driven by the vast amount of data collected by hospitals and healthcare centers in recent years. This wealth of information is not only reshaping business health outcomes but also enhancing clinical care, paving the way for more effective and personalized treatment approaches.

The potential for data analytics to help clinicians deliver better patient care has been well established. Research from the non-profit Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society shows that impressive benefits have been demonstrated in precision medicine, clinical decision support, patient monitoring, readmissions prevention, and population health management. Advanced data analytics also enhances operational efficiency, accelerates medical research, and improves public health monitoring.

There’s a brilliant future on the horizon, and Nevada’s only not-for-profit academic health system is making sure that it includes everyone. The Renown Health network serves over 1 million patients in Lake Tahoe, Eastern California, and Northern Nevada, operating the only Level II dedicated trauma center for both adults and children between Sacramento and Salt Lake City, and is home to the region’s only dedicated Children’s Hospital. Renown is affiliated with the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, where they are training the next generation of healthcare revolutionaries.

The industry needs leaders who can turn potential into meaningful progress. Across the approximately 6,120 hospitals and health systems in the U.S., there are fewer than 150 chief analytics officers and chief data officers driving the strategic use of data. This scarcity of leadership is closely tied to the analytic maturity of these organizations.

Justin Coran

“We still have thousands of institutions that may not have that type of insight and leadership within those organizations,” said Justin Coran, PhD, MPH, Renown’s Chief Analytics Officer. “It’s very common to start seeing less analytic maturity, which usually means your data is segmented across the company, across business units, maybe not harnessed and valued within a centralization strategy, which would allow a lot more people to be able to use governed, clean, well-defined data that they can trust.”

Renown was ready to refine its analytics journey to become a future leader in advanced analytics but was hamstrung by disparate data silos and fragmented reporting and wanted to rapidly improve those issues. They decided to integrate best-in-class tools and environments and acquire a very talented workforce that could collaborate to leverage data and information into a great strategic asset for the organization.

“This is a great opportunity to go into an organization, transform how they use data and information, and then to be able to look downstream at the performance outcomes that you can achieve when you start making really good decisions on data and are able to optimize rational decision-making,” he said of his decision to join Renown when they came calling.

Prior to his recruitment to Renown, Coran led the development of data science and analytics while serving as the first analytics leader and “C-Suite whisperer” for NOMS Healthcare and University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland.

Renown had yet to develop a formal analytics framework or defined process for data analysis, and there was no data or analytics governance program. There were only a few automated processes for data and reporting, most commonly used for fulfilling regulatory obligations. Their approach to self-service analytics had led to about 10,000 different power BI dashboards in use across the organization, creating a wildly disparate reporting environment. Coran immediately saw a pathway to rapid improvement.

With on-prem servers remaining in place, Renown added a multi-cloud system that enabled Renown to take advantage of best-in-class tools. Microsoft Azure serves as their primary data warehouse; AWS is used for telephony within Renown’s digital engagement center and call center. “We can be very flexible as a company to have the most cost-effective and efficient way of either storing data or moving data.”

Analytics moved into a centralized area that could govern and standardize data. “Part of that standardization is also metrics,” he said. “It wasn’t unusual to see four or five definitions of readmission rates for the hospital,” he added. “That was solved very, very quickly once we centralized disparate data and standardized metric definitions.”

Workforce training programs enable staff to access needed information. “Then we stood up the data and analytics governance program, which started allowing us to put standardization and methodology around how to calculate rates and information that supports the business.”

It took only six months to transform a disparate, siloed environment into a centralized, well-cultivated data environment with downstream reporting and automation. It can take other companies two or three years to hit that mark. “Having buy-in from top-down executive leadership allowed the company to transform their analytic infrastructure and reporting faster, leading to in-depth collaboration from across the company to harness data for strategy and action planning.”

There are bountiful opportunities to adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), generative AI, and robotic process automation throughout health organizations. “Advanced analytics can be implemented in revenue cycle operations, health plan operations, or quality reporting to third parties in order to optimize enterprise performance and have people work at their highest potential,” he noted.

Renown is implementing AI and generative AI into clinical workflows and operations. Microsoft’s Nuance DAX provides ambient listening technology that accurately hears the physician/patient encounter and then automatically transcribes and places notes in the electronic health record system. Automated Response Technology within Epic’s Electronic Health System’s In-Basket communication application allows providers to use generative AI to help write communications back to patients or other providers saving hours when documenting and communicating throughout their day. Renown’s clinicians can now focus more closely on the most important person in the exam room – the patient.

“The inclusion of analytics within business decision-making is critical to optimizing performance in our current healthcare environment. There’s a lot of pressure to lower healthcare costs while at the same time increasing volumes and being able to increase the amount of access that you can give patients within the community that you serve,” Coran concluded.

“Analytics is allowing us to do that better. It’s allowing us to be more sensitive to our community’s needs and, I believe, that as data and information grows in the healthcare industry, all of this digitization of our electronic health record system and now the inclusion of AI/ML, that the information gained from applied analytics will grow even more important when the goal is to lower costs, improve patient experience and quality, while at the same time optimizing health system performance.

“It’s an exciting time for analytics and for chief analytics officers and chief data officers within the healthcare sphere. I believe we are going to see analytics become a larger focus of health systems and the reliance on digital data will only increase, requiring more chief analytic officers or chief data officers to keep up on analytic transformation over the next five to 10 years.”

Renown Health is northern Nevada’s largest not-for-profit health network and a nationally recognized healthcare leader. With our dedicated staff, modern facilities, state-of-the-art technology, commitment to quality care, and role in educating future physicians and nurses, Renown Health delivers excellence in healthcare.

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Reno, NV 89502

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