University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics: Rising Above a Sea of Data

University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics (UWHC), part of the UW Health academic health system, has been recognized as one of the most progressive and prominent medical centers in the country. It was recently ranked in the top one percent of U.S. hospitals in five medical specialties, according to the U.S. News and World Report's “America’s Best Hospitals 2007” guide. This is just one of many accolades that UWHC has received over the years.

Like most healthcare organizations, UWHC has never suffered from a shortage of data. However, executives felt they were not able to effectively utilize the data to make decisions. They would regularly sift through reports from General Accounting, Cost Accounting, Statistics, Decision Support, Information Systems, Quality Improvement, as well as reports from various departmental staffs. Many of the reports were not germane to organizational objectives and it was possible to miss important trends within the voluminous reports.

So, rather than being strategic and focused, the executives found themselves spending far too much time reacting to problems and putting out fires, which was a resource-intense practice and often not well-coordinated.

In an effort to make sense of the data at the departmental level, various groups began developing their own independent dashboards. Many departments had their own "sources" of data, which sometimes didn’t match corporate information, causing continual confusion.

Additionally, there was incomplete, sometimes disjointed organizational dialogue on the subject of performance targets and thresholds for action.

The bottom line: the Hospital had a lot of data, but not much clarity on what to do with it.

This led the leadership at UWHC to seek a new solution that would help them rise above this data mess. But they wanted to go beyond simply sorting and organizing their data better. Rather, they sought a way to turn their data into a strategic tool that would empower executives, management, and staff to make better decisions based upon the information. They decided to build a predictive management system that would enable them to more effectively execute their strategic plans and manage overall performance.

UWHC settled on an automated dashboard system from ActiveStrategy that would help them aggregate and present critical organizational data and place this data within the context of strategic priorities. The software would also help the Hospital communicate and disseminate these strategic objectives more effectively, so improvement teams could focus on action directed at the most critical problems. Executives would then have a way to view progress toward achieving their strategic plan.

UWHC’s strategic dashboard uses six strategic groupings, called perspectives: Patient Satisfaction, Human Resources, Clinical Effectiveness, Operational Effectiveness, Market Share, and Financial, which were selected to reflect the Hospital’s critical stakeholders and strategic plan.

As they developed their strategic dashboards, the Hospital began to look for appropriate measures as milestones for achieving their strategic plan. This required a fair amount of benchmarking research with other university hospitals, as there were not many universally defined or agreed upon balanced performance measures in the healthcare industry at the time, beyond those that specifically addressed clinical quality.

Goals were set for most measures at or above the 90th percentile. In some cases, intermediate goals needed to be established. They would raise these goals higher once performance consistently exceeds the intermediate goal.

Since designing their strategic dashboards and automating them in ActiveStrategy software, UWHC has made progress in becoming more proactive and now has better defined tools to identify issues and research causes than what it had two years ago.

Hospital executives explained "If you listen during meetings, you hear more talk regarding performance and acceptance of what a measure is indicating. The discussions have a more balanced perspective. Solutions often consider the impact on several perspectives… they did this before, but now in quantitative terms everyone accepts. More attention is paid to trends over three to four months versus getting alarmed about a single adverse score. Management begins to research causes before a measure reaches a critical point."

ActiveStrategy Enterprise has been an important tool to help the Hospital make these shifts, allowing them to rise above the sea of data and instead focus on issues that will help move their strategy forward. The CEO keeps a keen eye on her strategic Dashboard and challenges her leadership team to act when problems arise.