Start with These 4 Fundamental Elements of Perinatal Analytics Success
One of the most exciting things about analytics is how it gives clinicians real-time information at the patient bedside – not after discharge – so they can adjust care on a day-by-day basis. It’s “How am I going to treat my patient tomorrow?” instead of “I wish I’d known that while my patient was still here.”
As we push the limits of what analytics can do, we’re seeing more of these exciting opportunities in the perinatal and postnatal areas. Here are four ways that analytics can improve the patient experience in the L&D department.
- Strategic staffing – We’ve been looking at the same patient-focused reports and monthly statistics for decades: deliveries and complications, gestational age, premature births, C-sections, etc. Analytics help you break out of this data rut to look inward at staffing challenges, one of the biggest hidden hurdles in delivering great patient care.Now you can ask: How long are nurses taking to document? When and where are they documenting – at the patient bedside, in the hallway after a visit, or at the nurses’ station hours later? Where is that nurse spending the bulk of their time? Were they in the room 100% of the time during the pushing phase, as guidelines recommend?
In an era of nursing shortages, this data can give you essential insight in your staffing strategy.
- Hardware efficiency – How your people use technology and hardware can undermine your budget and tie up staff. If you know which pieces of equipment are getting the most use – and why – you can redeploy the right technology at the right location to help your entire department operate more efficiently.For example, you might see that two computers are being used the majority of the time, but five others are going underutilized. With this knowledge, you can shift usage to get the most out of all your equipment.
- One entry point – With one login on one system, you can see across multiple care areas. Now you can link the perinatal department to the perioperative department, all the way from admission to discharge – and beyond, when you link to your EMR. You’ll even be able to see two to three years of patient records to track outcomes after discharge. For example, you can track patients’ progress from triage to admission in the perinatal department. This gives transparency to the process, helping with cost containment and making sure patients come into the hospital as efficiently as possible, making sure patients don’t spend hours in triage or are admitted with issues that should be addressed on an outpatient basis.At the administrative level, CFOs, CIOs, CNOs can access individualized dashboards around cost and quality. No more logging into several systems to hunt down the bits and pieces that make up the big picture. No more manually archiving and restoring patient records to follow up on patients after discharge.
- Refined information – If your department sees five deliveries a month, you need different information than a facility that has 4,000 deliveries a month. An analytics solution lets you filter the information of your choice to get the insight that will mean the most to your department. That’s the sweet spot.