LOS ANGELES – The California Heart Center Foundation implemented a standalone dashboard to monitor its productivity, financial performance and referrals from outside physicians almost a year ago in 2006. Especially in the last six months, the affiliate of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine and Medical Center has seen a return on investment in these areas and in others it hadn’t anticipated.
The foundation can monitor on a daily basis the spread between expected and actual reimbursements from its managed care payers and payer performance of claims processing. In one week, officials noticed that the actual reimbursement from one payer was 30 percent off of the expected reimbursement, said Eric Marton, president and CEO.
Once it was determined that the contract had not changed in any way, the foundation called the managed care organization and the problem was resolved.
If not for the dashboard, the problem may have gone undetected for several months.
The foundation, which directs the largest heart transplant and heart failure program in the world, can get a visual representation of patient referrals. Marton said they were surprised to find that a significant volume of referred patients came from a few physician groups that they had not paid much attention to in the past. Understanding the importance of provider-physician relationships, the foundation took proactive marketing steps to offer services and greater communications to those groups, thereby retaining and even increasing the referral rate.
The dashboard was also “overwhelmingly well-received” by the foundation’s board of directors. Board members can log onto the system and see “actual, real-time performance data that is relevant to them,” said Marton. “This gives the board great transparency, which is so critical in today’s regulatory environment.”
“Dashboards and BI (business intelligence) tools are all about transparency,” said Datamonitor analyst Markella Kordoyanni. “Dashboard solutions, along with other types of BI solutions, will become increasingly important for hospitals and IDNs in the coming years. As pay-for-performance systems and consumerism begin to shape the healthcare environment and demand new types of business models from these organizations, transparency will be a main business and organizational goal.”
The foundation is looking to apply business intelligence analytics to its clinical operations as well. The dashboard will allow physicians to better understand their patient populations as well as to monitor outcomes.
This process will accelerate the team’s ability to develop new clinical protocols that will benefit future patients.
Shadan Malik, CEO and founder of iDashboards, said this particular implementation isn’t the norm in healthcare.
“This is a pioneering case and the beginning of a trend in the healthcare industry toward leveraging business intelligence (BI) technology,” he said.