This initiative shows the possibilities when healthcare invests in data.
Five medical centers in the University of California Health system have collected more than a decade’s worth of cardiac surgical data. Now, that data is being used to optimize hospital efficiency, and reduce costs by millions.
The surgical data, comprising more than 200 elements from each patient at the health system, has undergone advanced analytics to give financial executives insight into local and systemwide performance, according to the university. So far, executives have used the data to streamline care and improve financial margins, resulting in 132 bed days saved, and $15 million in savings so far.
How it works
The collective, known as the University of California Cardiac Surgery Consortium (UCCSC), consists of UC Davis Medical Center, UC San Francisco Medical Center, UCLA Medical Center, UC Irvine Medical Center and UC San Diego Medical Center.
The consortium is working to build standardized and sustainable quality improvements. To ensure this quality, these metrics are vetted, audited, and fall in line with a national database known as Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS).
“We can benchmark ourselves against national data, and that allows us to be sure that we are among the best quality, elite institutions performing cardiac surgery, not only in the state and in our local markets, but nationally,” said Richard J. Shemin, MD, chief of the division of cardiac surgery and professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The UCCSC aims to increase the volume of procedures and reduce their variability, where it has seen some success. When analyzing the generated cost savings, the UCCSC found that early extubation resulted in a margin improvement of roughly $6.7 million, and decreased ventilation saved about $3.6 million. The 132 bed days saved equaled cost savings of about $486,000.
Beyond this, the UCCSC also aims to optimize costs and explore contracting opportunities, such as joint purchasing, according to the university.
“It’s amazing that through collaboration and data analysis we have been able to improve patients’ lives as well as optimize the health systems’ economic efficiency,” said Nancy Satou, RN, director of informatics & database management in the division of cardiac surgery at UCLA Health.
For The CFO
This initiative shows the power of the healthcare industry when it invests in organized data and the effect it can have on patient care. CFOs should pay attention to projects like this, as well as others like the Truveta Genome Project, another initiative to improve care and lower costs through robust datasets.
While the funds for these projects don’t always appear from organizations like the UCCSC, this is where health systems can glance into what’s possible from a collective effort aimed at fixing a fundamental challenge in healthcare, — the lack of organized, analyzed, specific data.
CFOs should recognize the long-term importance of investing in initiatives like this. When the healthcare industry can efficiently make use of accurate data in every step of every patient’s healthcare journey, that’s when the industry will be able to embrace real change.
Marie DeFreitas is the CFO editor for HealthLeaders.
