UCSF Health’s mission to maximize healthcare value has been exemplified in its numerous initiatives to improve quality of care while reducing waste and healthcare costs. Strategic investments help expand clinical services offered while a culture of continuous improvement has empowered frontline providers to help realize organizational goals. Whether it is understanding the current state, identifying opportunities for improvement, testing the impact of experiments, or tracking the success of projects, the importance of data and analytics cannot be overstated. Easy access to clinical and financial data, and the ability to analyze it, however has been a challenge. The Value Improvement Program at UCSF believes that empowering providers and staff at all levels with accurate data, and means to analyze it, will inevitably result in improved engagement of clinical teams, improve participation in innovative programs, and reduce costs of care. As such, we have developed a self-service “costs of care” calculator called Insights though collaboration with Tag.bio, a data science startup.

Insights allows for users to use a simple interface to query clinical and financial from a validated database and leverages “protocols” that apply structured and standardized analytic techniques to measure costs of care, identify opportunities for improvement, evaluate the distribution of covariates among a cohort of patients, and compare populations. The ability to rapidly build highly specific cohorts for analysis and run repeated analyses in a matter of seconds to minutes (rather than waiting weeks for manual “data pulls” from alternative sources) removes any barriers to asking questions. It allows users to follow a thread of inquiry until they have reached a conclusion — in this manner, there are truly no stupid questions, and no downside to asking, and asking again. In minutes, users can export and share results, engaging both leadership as well as their peers on improvement teams. This type of engagement has the potential to develop a robust bottom-up pipeline for maximizing healthcare value.

Slides: https://ucsf.box.com/s/m9hme0ufbupjkf5036n9zl5d19h20doj (MyAccess login required)