Texas Children's Hospital (TCH) recently made the decision to use a data warehousing and advanced analytics solution provided by Health Catalyst. As a result of using this new system, the hospital reduced unnecessary x-rays by 15 percent and intends to apply this efficiency to other areas of hospital operations.
The switch to the Health Catalyst platform came after an earlier campaign failed to provide helpful data to clinic decision makers. Even though the campaign started using electronic health records (EHR), the data collected was not meaningful enough to aid the hospital in improving care.
That's where Health Catalyst stepped in. It provided the data warehousing solution and analyzed clinical practices to help the hospital identify areas needing improvement. A TCH clinical team's evaluation of the data concluded that asthma care was a source of inefficiency; more chest x-rays were being administered than were necessary.
As a result of the analysis, the TCH clinical team developed procedures that reduced unnecessary x-rays by 15 percent. The hospital will expand Health Catalyst technology to analyze treatment of pneumonia.
These cost-saving results are what Health Catalyst seeks to help care providers find. Its solutions are based on the idea of taking disparate data and integrating it to provide meaningful results.
The Salt Lake City-based company has helped other providers like Stanford Hospital and Clinics, North Memorial Health Care and MultiCare realize significant cost savings.
The excessive use of diagnostic imaging such as x-rays, CT scans and ultrasounds is a problem not limited to Texas Children's Hospital, and other providers Health Catalyst has helped. An estimate from the Canadian Association of Radiologists concluded that 30 percent of imaging diagnostics provided no helpful information.
The adage that there are two inevitable things in life – death and taxes – should be amended to include a third inevitability: rising healthcare costs. Anything that can be done to reduce these costs will be embraced by the healthcare industry and its patients. Health Catalyst has identified common practices of many providers that are wasteful, and studies show that this is apparently a widespread problem.
It’ll give the company plenty of opportunities to add to its resume of success stories.
Edited by
Braden Becker
