CHA To Pilot Analytics To Target Triple Aim Goals

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

The analytics pilot program is anticipated to help the Children’s Hospital Association’s 220 member hospitals enhance their comparative analytics.

The Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) announced it has entered an agreement with Health Catalyst to enhance comparative analytics for its 220 member hospitals, thus helping achieve their goals of improving care and reducing costs for pediatric patients. “This strategic relationship with Health Catalyst will enable the Association to deliver the next generation of our data and analytics programs to meet our members’ needs and support improved child health,” said Mark Wietecha, president and CEO of Children's Hospital Association.

Leveraging Health Catalyst’s Late-Binding Enterprise Data Warehouse, CHA hospitals will aggregate clinical and operational data with the goal of accelerating their ability to evaluate evidence-based practices and benchmark their performance against their peer institutions. The platform will help CHA analyze and centralize data faster and in a more comprehensive manner.

“What we are trying to do here, and what this pilot will position us to do, is take clinical, administrative, and operational data in and do what we are referring to as intentional connections between those,” Richard Stepanek, CIO at Child Health Corporation of America told Health Data Management. “In that you can start to see support for the Triple Aim types of pieces of data, cost, and quality equations our hospitals will need to analyze. That's one of the objectives we think this will help us get to.”

The pilot will start with Milwaukee-based Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and Texas Children’s Hospital, both current Health Catalyst clients and CHA members. As part of the pilot, CHA will draw data directly from the EHRs of the hospitals, and house the information in a data warehouse for analysis.

“CHA and the comparative analysis they provide has been a key enabler of our quality improvement efforts for years,” said Peggy Troy, RN, MSN, President and CEO of Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. “We expect this new approach will significantly accelerate the quality improvement efforts not only of Children's of Wisconsin but of pediatric hospitals across the country.”

According to Charles G. Macias, MD, MPH, Chief Clinical Systems Integration Officer for Texas Children’s Hospital, his hospital and Health Catalyst have been working together since 2012 to improve clinical care with positive results. Their experience with Health Catalyst has demonstrated the power of the enterprise data warehouse, and when combined with CHA’s analytics solutions, Macias believes the results can only tender better efforts.

While details of the pilot are still being formulated, Macias told Health Data Management that he is eager to get underway. “I think it's a great opportunity for us,” Macias said. “I think we are going to be pleasantly surprised by how much granularity and data we can collect. Benchmarking data in the pediatric world is almost non-existent. What has existed in the CHA is probably the best there is, and it's delayed and doesn't have common standards at a very granular level because of where informatics was at different organizations.

“I see this pilot work with Children's Hospital of Wisconsin as demonstrating such refinement in whatever data goes in that whatever answer we get to any question we pose will have so much clarity and precision that it won't matter whether the answer is good or bad. It's just going to be a right answer.”