To do healthcare benchmarking effectively and efficiently, healthcare organizations need to know where they’re underperforming, where they’re performing well, and how to focus and prioritize their improvement efforts. They also need a new approach to benchmarking that isn’t limited to the inpatient setting. The Health Catalyst® Touchstone™ product is the next-generation healthcare benchmarking and prioritization tool that delivers what antiquated benchmarking technologies cannot: Risk-adjusted benchmarking across the full continuum of care. Artificial intelligence-powered recommendations. Ranked lists of improvement opportunities. Detailed analytics and an intuitive user interface that enable the easy exploration of factors driving performance issues. Democratized benchmarking that’s available to as many people as the organization wants. Touchstone was designed with many users and use cases in mind, from population health analysts looking to improve ACO performance to C-suite leaders who need a data-driven approach to prioritizing improvement opportunities.

1. Introducing Touchstone:
The Next-Generation Healthcare Benchmarking and
Opportunity Prioritization Tool

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Healthcare Benchmarking
When it comes to healthcare benchmarking
today, organizations need to be able to do
four things quickly, effectively, and efficiently:
Identify where they are underperforming
See where they are performing well.
Decide where to focus their improvement efforts.
Prioritize their improvement efforts.
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January 2018 Survey of US Healthcare Executives
by Health Catalyst (Click to Download)

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Healthcare Benchmarking
Many things stand in the way of accomplishing these objectives:
The process of selecting opportunities for performance
improvement is under-informed by data.
Healthcare benchmarking data, used to compare an
organization’s processes to those of top-performing
organizations nationwide, is notoriously difficult to explore.
Analysts must sift through hundreds of benchmarks
to uncover opportunities for improvement, yet lack
visibility into areas of high performance and causes
of underperformance.
Most benchmarks address only inpatient performance,
ignoring the comparative data from care settings
outside the hospital that is essential to
population health management.
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Healthcare Benchmarking
Health Catalyst® Touchstone™ not only resolves
these problems, but also expands the definition of
benchmarking to include the full continuum of care.
Touchstone proactively delivers prioritized,
artificial intelligence (AI)-powered improvement
recommendations in an intelligent, intuitive
user interface.
It’s the next-generation benchmarking and
prioritization tool healthcare needs to
accelerate outcomes improvement.

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Current Approaches to Opportunity Identification
and Healthcare Benchmarking Miss the Mark
Current benchmarking tools are built on antiquated
technologies and are primarily focused on
performance monitoring rather than recommending
and driving sustained improvements.
Unable to drill into healthcare data to reveal the
cause of benchmark failures, current tools cannot
tell organizations how to make improvements.
Their high-cost, rudimentary user interfaces and
limited use by a small number of people hampers
their ability to democratize data and accelerate
improvements.

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Current Approaches to Opportunity Identification
and Healthcare Benchmarking Miss the Mark
Current benchmarking tools provide either inpatient
or ambulatory benchmarks, but rarely both.
As a result, it is difficult to monitor performance
across the continuum of care, making population
health management less effective.
Unlike these traditional, antiquated approaches,
Touchstone proactively recommends the top
improvement opportunities from across the full
continuum of care.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Developed in partnership with some of the
nation’s most prestigious healthcare
organizations and by leveraging Health
Catalyst’s proven ability to manage trillions of
data points, Touchstone combs through data
from EHRs, claims, cost-accounting datasets,
operations, and external benchmarks to provide:
Risk-adjusted benchmarking
AI-powered intelligent direction
Ranked list of improvement opportunities
Detailed analytics
Democratized benchmarking
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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Risk-adjusted benchmarking
Reveals an organization’s performance data across the
continuum of care and in context, at the point of
decision-making via an intuitive user interface.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
AI-powered intelligent direction
Uses AI and Elasticsearch, an in-memory NoSQL database
capable of querying billions of records in less than one
second, to guide users to the data and analyses that are
most relevant to their work and to the organization’s goals.
AI accounts for variation in care, external benchmarks,
trending analysis, and outlier detection to recommend how
improvements can be made.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Ranked list of improvement opportunities
Helps users prioritize initiatives based on projected
clinical, financial, and operational improvements
and associated dollar value.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Detailed analytics
Helps users prioritize initiatives based on projected
clinical, financial, and operational improvements and
associated dollar value.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Democratized benchmarking
Makes benchmarking available to as many people
as the organization wants, speeding the sharing of
insights leading to improvements.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Unlike traditional linear modeling approaches,
Touchstone uses machine learning algorithms
to find the highest areas of improvement
opportunity, and then recommends those
areas in a user-friendly, intuitive user interface
that empowers analysts to explore the
underlying factors behind each opportunity.

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Touchstone recommendations (Figure 1) show improvement opportunities based
on costs and/or outcomes by patient cohorts, departments, or organization wide.
Drill-down capabilities enable
detailed root cause analysis
and data-driven insights.
Figure 1: Touchstone Recommendations Demonstrate Intuitive Drill-Down Capabilities

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Touchstone’s prioritization matrix (Figure 2) and easy-to-use
interface turns average analysts, usually hindered by very
manual processes, into extremely efficient, world-class analysts.
It answers analysts’ most common questions:
Where do I have the highest length of stay (LOS) compared
to risk-adjusted benchmarks?
Which patient cohorts do I have the greatest opportunity
to improve when considering my performance on all my
cost and outcome metrics simultaneously?
How can I combine clinical variation analysis and
comparisons to risk-adjusted benchmarks to find
opportunities to improve or areas where I excel?
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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Figure 2: Touchstone Prioritization Matrix Powered by Machine Learning

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Touchstone Supercharges Healthcare Improvement
Touchstone lets analysts look at many different
factors simultaneously: a global perspective
that’s rare in healthcare benchmarking and
performance improvement, and helps analysts
identify the factors underlying each opportunity.
In the same way Netflix finetunes its
recommendations based on user preferences
over time, Touchstone’s recommendations
improve over time based on user interest (e.g.,
surgical services, labor and delivery, etc.).

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Touchstone Modules Address Clinical,
Operational, and Financial Improvement Needs
Touchstone’s modules address healthcare
organizations’ most demanding clinical,
operational, and financial improvement needs:
Inpatient Module
Population Health Module>
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Touchstone Modules Address Clinical,
Operational, and Financial Improvement Needs
Inpatient Module
Discovers areas of excellence within an
organization compared to national benchmarks.
It identifies inpatient performance opportunities
against risk-adjusted benchmarks for metrics
such as mortality, LOS, readmissions, and
variable direct costs (e.g., supplies, labor, etc.).
It also identifies care processes that offer the
greatest opportunity for improvement: those
with high variation in cost and poor outcomes.

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Touchstone Modules Address Clinical,
Operational, and Financial Improvement Needs
Population Health Module
Enables organizational performance against
risk-adjusted benchmarks for metrics such as
cost (per member per month), utilization,
mortality, LOS, and readmission.
It also gives organizations insight into their
highest-performing primary care physicians in
a network, patient populations based on
chronic conditions, and health plan
performance compared to similar plans
nationwide or throughout a specific region.

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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
Touchstone’s state-of-the-art outcomes
improvement and benchmarking capabilities
were designed with multiple users and
everyday use cases in mind:
Population Health Analyst who wants to
improve ACO performance
Health Plan Analyst looking for opportunities
to improve benefit design
Program Manager who wants to improve
outcomes and lower costs
Chief Quality Officer who wants a data-driven
approach to setting improvement goals
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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
Population Health Analyst Who Wants to Improve ACO Performance
A population health analyst wants to understand how
to improve ACO performance.
Touchstone recommends an opportunity to reduce
inpatient utilization in the diabetic population attributed
to the organization’s Medicare MSSP contract.
After drilling into Touchstone’s explore tab, the
population health analyst discovers that high inpatient
utilization is being driven by patients attributed to five
primary care providers who have visit utilization rates
80 percent lower than the risk-adjusted benchmark.
The analyst recommends scheduling the physicians’
patients for wellness visits.

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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
Health Plan Analyst Looking for Opportunities to Improve Benefit Design
A health plan analyst looking for opportunities to
improve benefit design is directed by Touchstone
to an orthopedics doctor who performs knee
replacements that are 20 percent less
expensive than the benchmark, with a
readmission rate that is 15 percent lower.
The following year, the plan augments its
benefit design to drive more volume to the
high-performing doctor.

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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
Program Manager Who Wants to Improve Outcomes and Lower Costs
A program manager in a hospital’s surgical department
uses Touchstone to look for opportunities to lower
costs and improve outcomes.
Touchstone recommends an opportunity to improve
the mortality rate for CABG procedures, currently
running 90 percent higher than the risk-adjusted
benchmark would expect.

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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
Program Manager Who Wants to Improve Outcomes and Lower Costs
Drilling into the data, the manager finds that three
physicians’ cases are driving most of the high
mortality rates and that the variable direct cost of
supplies is correlated with these higher-than-
expected mortality rates.
The manager deploys a clinical analyst to
investigate the specific drivers of the cost
differential, positing that if there are discrepancies
in the way these three providers deliver care
they could be rectified to reduce overall
mortality and cost.

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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
Chief Quality Officer Who Wants a Data-Driven Approach to Setting
Improvement Goals
Healthcare C-suites (chief quality officers, chief
medical officers, chief finance officers, etc.) finally
have a data-driven approach to selecting and
prioritizing improvement goals.
Touchstone empowers C-suites to make data-
driven decisions in pursuit of improvement goals
with the highest ROI.

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From Analysts to C-Suites: Touchstone Was Built
with Everyday Use Cases in Mind
No matter the user or the use case, Touchstone’s
intelligent user experience makes it simple for
everyone, even non-analysts, to accomplish
their specific goals.

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Touchstone Is the Industry’s Next-Generation Tool for
Healthcare Benchmarking and Performance Improvement
Touchstone transforms the industry’s traditional,
myopic approach to healthcare benchmarking
and performance improvement.
It proactively recommends prioritized
opportunities using AI-powered risk models.
It democratizes benchmarking for all staff with
an intelligent, intuitive user interface.
It includes risk-adjusted benchmarks for the full
continuum of care–not just the inpatient setting.
And it allows for quick, iterative root cause
analyses to understand the elusive “why”
behind each opportunity.

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Touchstone Is the Industry’s Next-Generation Tool for
Healthcare Benchmarking and Performance Improvement
Touchstone is the next-generation healthcare
benchmarking and prioritization tool healthcare
organizations can rely on to accelerate
outcomes improvement, enhance performance,
and achieve a competitive advantage.

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For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

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More about this topic
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
Introducing Touchstone: The Next-Generation Healthcare Benchmarking and
Opportunity Prioritization Tool
Health Catalyst® Touchstone™
Health Catalyst Product Overview
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Levi Thatcher, Director of Data Science
Machine Learning 101: 5 Easy Steps for Using it in Healthcare
Michael Mastanduno, PhD, Data Scientist
Why Pioneer ACOs Are Disappearing and 3 Trends to Expect from the Exodus
Aaron Neiderhiser, Product Management, Sr. Director; Ben Castleton & Bobbi Brown
6 Steps for Implementing Successful Performance Improvement Initiatives in Healthcare
Bobbi Brown, Senior VP; Leslie Hough Falk, Senior VP

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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Aaron joined Health Catalyst in April 2014 as a Data Architect. Prior to joining Health
Catalyst, Aaron worked for Colorado Medicaid, managing ACO health analytics projects.
Aaron is a graduate of Coe College and holds a master’s degree in economics from the
University of Colorado.
Aaron Neiderhiser
Dorian joined Health Catalyst in July 2013. Prior to coming to Health Catalyst, Dorian
worked for PeaceHealth as a Senior Data Warehouse Developer. Dorian has a Bachelor
of Science Degree from Oregon State University and her PMP certification.
Dorian DiNardo