Leveraging analytics consulting and a performance dashboard for operational improvement

Beverly Hospital, a 221-bed community hospital north of Boston, MA, asked Philips to help improve operational efficiency in their emergency department. As part of an ED performance improvement engagement, our analytics consultants provided data insights and developed a custom performance dashboard.

The dashboard provided staff, management, and leadership at-a-glance visibility into performance metrics. As a result of our data-driven consulting recommendations and change implementation support, Beverly Hospital’s ED has achieved the below results.*

Our analytics consultants completed deep data analysis focused on patient arrival patterns, volume trends, payer mix, and throughput metrics such as arrival-to-provider, bed request to bed assignment, decision to depart, and length-of-stay, as well as provider performance.

The team created an analytics dashboard to provide insights into daily operational performance and data-driven recommendations for process improvements. The Beverly Hospital team requested a subscription to the dashboard, with daily updates and additional custom views, so that staff and leadership could have ongoing access to the performance data and reports.

Philips analytics consultants held a workshop with stakeholders from various departments and levels to agree the key requirements for three custom dashboard views:

• Physician Dashboard – to track patient volume, throughput times, and acuity by provider with the ability to differentiate between physicians and advanced practice providers
• Nursing Dashboard – to track patient throughput times, acuity levels, and left without being seen rates by nurse
• Outlier Dashboard – to track patients experiencing extended throughput times and data documentation issues (i.e.: missing a provider name or acuity level)

The dashboard saves countless hours of weekly data analysis and has become the ‘source of truth’. Daily reports provided high-level insight into areas of strength and weakness, with the option to drill down and view detailed data to understand the root cause behind the metrics.

The dashboard delivered increased transparency into patient trends, ED provider performance, and more. Metrics on throughput times at the provider level, for both physicians and advanced practice providers, were reviewed closely.

The Beverly ED leaders and Philips consultants increased focus on reducing the time between bed request to patient depart. Process changes were implemented and a 31% decrease, from 204 minutes to 141 minutes (January - June 2019) was achieved.

The dashboard also provided the Chair of Emergency Medicine with the data needed to help confirm volume trends when providers advised they were experiencing increased patient arrivals, improve alignment of staffing to patient demand, and avoid $1.3m in unnecessary additional staffing.