Healthcare organizations have long relied on traditional benchmarking to compare their performance to others and determine where they can do better; however, to identify the highest ROI improvement opportunities and understand how to take action, organizations need more comprehensive data. Next-generation opportunity analysis tools, such as Health Catalyst® Touchstone™, use machine learning to identify projects with the greatest need for improvement and the greatest potential ROI. Because Touchstone determines prioritization with data from across the continuum of care, users can drive improvement decisions with information appropriate to their patient population and the domains they’re addressing.

1. Prioritizing Healthcare
Projects to Optimize ROI

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Prioritizing Healthcare Projects
To thrive in today’s improvement-focused
healthcare environment and achieve sustainable
transformation, healthcare organizations must
prioritize improvement projects with analytics-
driven processes and technologies.
By strategically prioritizing healthcare projects,
health systems can focus on opportunities that
optimize their ROI while working within their
individual resource constraints.
Otherwise, organizations risk devoting time,
money, and skills in areas where they’re
unlikely to realize quality or financial gains.

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Prioritizing Healthcare Projects
Health Catalyst® Touchstone™ is an artificial
intelligence-powered next-generation opportunity
analysis and prioritization tool that helps health
systems determine which projects represent the
greatest ROI for patients and for the bottom line.
Touchstone leverages two key capabilities to
identify opportunities and prioritize projects:
Proactively recommends improvement
opportunities to users based on
risk-adjusted benchmarks.
Enables users to drill into the “why”
behind an opportunity, so they
understand how to improve.
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Effective Improvement Requires More than
Traditional Benchmarking
Healthcare benchmarking is a practice that
compares an organization’s performance
metrics to a standard developed using data
from similar organizations.
Benchmarking shows healthcare leaders how
their organizations are performing compared
to similar health systems; it also shows them
where they can improve.

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Effective Improvement Requires More than
Traditional Benchmarking
According to 2018 survey conducted by Health
Catalyst, 72 percent of healthcare leaders
consider benchmarking important or extremely
important in identifying and prioritizing
improvement projects.
Of these executives, 22 percent say that an
organization’s performance against benchmarks
is the most influential factor in determining
which improvement initiatives to launch;
benchmarking followed regulatory/reporting
requirements (25 percent) and improvement
team priorities (24 percent).

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Effective Improvement Requires More than
Traditional Benchmarking
Even though many leaders consider benchmarking
a critical tool in improvement project prioritization,
benchmarks still don’t support highly data-driven
strategic planning and fall short when it comes to
identifying the greatest opportunity for an
organization to improve.
Benchmarking data tends to be limited to specific
domains (e.g., inpatient), may not be truly
compatible with an organization’s patient
population (due to factors such as age and
socioeconomic status), and rarely captures
performance across the continuum of care (e.g.,
both inpatient and ambulatory settings).

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Effective Improvement Requires More than
Traditional Benchmarking
Benchmarks may tell leaders limited
quantitative data (e.g., that an opportunity
exists), but don’t necessarily tell them
where and how to strategically improve to
achieve the best ROI.
And, even when they do find an
improvement opportunity, benchmarks
don’t include the critical qualitative data
that helps organizations understand if
they’re ready to take on a project.

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Effective Improvement Requires More than
Traditional Benchmarking
To carry out data-driven improvement, health
systems need more comprehensive processes
than traditional benchmarking; processes that
run on data from across the continuum of care
and make informed, automated improvement
recommendations.

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More Granular Data for More Comparisons and
More Effective Prioritizations
Healthcare is currently experiencing a data
explosion, in which it’s constantly flooded
with more sources of information.
Ideally, improvement leaders want to
incorporate as many data and comparison
sources as possible in improvement
opportunity assessment and prioritization.

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More Granular Data for More Comparisons and
More Effective Prioritizations
Many health systems have dozens, and
sometimes hundreds, of data sources
flowing into their EDW.
To fully leverage this overflow of data,
health systems need tools, such as
Touchstone, that look across all healthcare
data sources, not just the EMR, to identify
opportunities for improvement.

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More Granular Data for More Comparisons and
More Effective Prioritizations
Touchstone uses risk-adjusted benchmarks for
dozens of utilization and outcomes metrics.
The data starts at the encounter level (the
lowest grain of data), allowing users to slice
and dice their metrics by any dimension and
see a corresponding risk-adjusted benchmark.
This process yields thousands of comparisons
and, with data across the full continuum of
care, achieves more ROI-driven prioritization
than traditional benchmarking.

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Success in Healthcare Today Relies on Finding
the Biggest Improvement Opportunities
To succeed in improvement, health systems
must start with a clear understanding of their
most impactable improvement opportunities,
including which of those opportunities
promises the biggest ROI.
If organizations don’t prioritize areas where
they’ve identified the greatest need for
improvement, they will see little ROI.

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Success in Healthcare Today Relies on Finding
the Biggest Improvement Opportunities
With effective improvement project
prioritization, organizations can devote
time and resources to the more complex,
yet critical, qualitative aspects of
transforming care, such as understanding
their readiness to tackle improvement.
Qualitative improvement opportunity
analysis is equally important as
identifying the best opportunities for
improvement and prioritizing them,
as it shows organizations whether
they have the capacity to carry out
and sustain improvement work.

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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.
Prioritizing Healthcare Projects to Optimize ROI
Introducing Touchstone: The Next-Generation Healthcare Benchmarking and Opportunity
Prioritization Tool – Aaron Neiderhiser, Product Management, Sr. Director;
Dorian DiNardo, Senior VP of Analytics
Why Most Analytic Applications Will Never Be Able to Significantly Improve Healthcare
Outcomes – Dan Soule, VP of Product Management
Quality Improvement in Healthcare: Where Is the Best Place to Start?
Eric Just, Senior VP of Product Development
MultiCare’s Transformational Journey Toward Sustained Outcomes Improvement
Health Catalyst Success Story
Using Value to Prioritize and Guide Analytics Investments
Health Catalyst Success Story

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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Dorian DiNardo 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
Aaron Neiderhiser 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