University of Colorado Health, LeanTaaS Collaboration Honored for Expanding Access to Care
PHOENIX, AZ, November 3, 2016 – Over the past two years, the University of Colorado Hospital experienced 14 percent growth at its infusion center. The increased utilization led to longer wait times, reduced patient satisfaction, and excess use of nursing overtime.
Knowing that the situation was unsustainable, Steve Hess, chief information officer for the hospital’s parent organization, UCHealth, teamed up with analytics firm LeanTaaS to develop a solution that has given patients greater access to life-saving treatments with far less wait times. This inventive partnership earned UCHealth and LeanTaaS the College of Healthcare Information Management’s 2016 Collaboration Award, which was presented today at the CHIME16 Fall CIO Forum in Phoenix.
The solution — iQueue — is a cloud-based, predictive analytics tool that taps into scheduling data from the electronic health record (EHR) and allows leaders at UCHealth to better forecast usage patterns. The result is more efficient scheduling for patients and staff. In less than three months, wait times at the infusion center dropped 15 percent overall and 33 percent during peak hours. At the same time, daily volume jumped 7 percent and patient satisfaction scores rose significantly. The hospital also saw overtime decrease by 20 hours per month.
“We have extremely bright operational and clinical leaders trying to solve difficult problems, but sometimes answers are not obvious in the data,” Hess said. “We are moving away from the ‘I need more data’ phenomenon to different, more automated, and more objective ways of looking at the data. The collaboration with LeanTaaS has delivered us a level of maturity around data science that permeates many areas now.”
This isn’t a one-and-done approach. Rather, it is all about continuous improvement. The LeanTaaS solution relies on machine-learning algorithms that then help operational and clinical leaders develop performance improvement strategies.
“Hospitals have thousands of scarce resources that are overbooked, leading to long wait times and difficulties in offering appointments unless they are several weeks out into the future,” said Mohan Giridharadas, LeanTaaS founder and CEO. “This results in a risk of adversely impacting the patient experience and creating an upward pressure on capital and operating budgets. Our optimization algorithms help providers unlock capacity by better matching the demand curve with the supply capacity, which results in a smoother flow. Providers can see more patients and reduce wait times.”
Improving the patient experience is especially critical as the delivery system moves to value-based payment models. Instead of building more infusion bays or operating rooms, Hess said, UCHealth is trying to use its limited resources to deliver better care in a more efficient manner.
“Collaborations like the one between UCHealth and LeanTaaS are a perfect example of how we are moving beyond the traditional provider-vendor relationship,” added CHIME President and CEO Russell Branzell, FCHIME, CHCIO. “We are all in this together and in order to transform care, we have to think about new ways of doing business. Creating these types of partnerships will help us reach the Triple Aim of an improved patient experience, better health and lower costs.”
To learn more about the CHIME Collaboration Award, click here.
About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With nearly 2,000 CIO members and over 150 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit chimecentral.org.
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