In today’s reform environment, the importance of turning data into timely and informed decision-making is a fundamental requirement for health care provider organizations. Analytics are vital to support health care transformation by providing the key information for the management of populations to achieve value. Data on patients, their medical status and the progression of their conditions will be available from new sources, in new formats, in much greater volumes and at more regular intervals. This avalanche of data including the kind related to new practices, devices, treatments and outcomes will need to be organized and structured in a logical framework to enable informed decision-making.
As we continue to transform Healthcare Analytics at OSF HealthCare, we must make critical decisions about future partnerships to support big data analytics, predictive modeling, population health analytics, as well as, implement systems and processes that support the ability to truly understand the cost of care.
OSF Healthcare Analytics Vision & Guiding Principles
The vision for the Healthcare Analytics Division, a part of OSF Innovation, is to enable and enhance an analytics capability that supports a growing culture of data-driven and contextual decision-making. Continued development will enable OSF to leverage analytics and process improvement techniques to serve high-performing care delivery teams and our patients, in a manner where OSF is seen as one of the innovative pioneers of the new health care model.
We have a variety of roles within OSF including to support the One OSF strategy, clinical agenda and the execution of strategic initiatives. Our group establishes an enterprise view of revenue, cost and quality information for every patient and clinician and encourages a single source of truth for the tactical and strategic analytics information needs for the organization.
We’ve developed a common analytics model to easily track ministry priorities. Healthcare Analytics continually explores and tests new data sources, techniques, and tools, seeking to optimize and enhance our clinical and strategic analytics.
It’s also our role to grow a robust, thriving team with a depth of technical knowledge, clinical expertise and business acumen.
Healthcare Analytics Scope
As OSF HealthCare continues to expand geographically, enhance patient care to provide excellence in clinical outcomes and move to value-based population health care, there is increased need to integrate and transform more data from our source of electronic health records and many other external data sources. The integration and development of data provide the capability to turn the data into information driving knowledge, insight and ultimately outcome optimization and foresight for OSF leaders, clinicians and Mission Partners. As we advance down the analytics journey to having more capability to provide prospective analyses, we will be able to reveal systemic issues and accelerate diffusion of best practices which represents the next phase of advanced analytics.
The health care industry has an imperative to do more with less which means growing systems like OSF have ever-growing demands for analytics capabilities to support their decision-making needs. OSF Healthcare Analytics continues to support the strategic goals and initiatives of OSF through the ongoing development and expansion of its scope of services.
To keep pace with the needs and demand, OSF must continue to invest in the resources (Mission Partners and Technology). That includes developing ways to recruit and retain the best candidates. In addition, the need for new sources of data, predictive algorithms and modeling will require expansion and new technology infrastructure considerations such as evolving from a data warehouse to a data ecosystem which includes both on-premise hardware and cloud-based infrastructure.
Products – Clinical, Population Health, Market/Consumer, Financial & Operational Analytics
Over the past four years, Healthcare Analytics has developed and maintains numerous Dashboards to assist in monitoring progress toward OSF goals as the dashboards have established targets and are used to drive performance improvement. In addition, several self-service Explorers which are information exploration tools, assist our Mission Partners in using available information to uncover valuable insights and opportunities.
Over the years as Healthcare Analytics has matured and extended the access to key strategic information across the Ministry, there continues to be a growing need for analysis and insight development in partnership with many business/clinical leaders driving change and improvement. Healthcare Analytics provides expanded analytic information, services and analytic insight to improve patient care, outcomes, population health, operational and financial performance.
Advanced Analytics
The Advanced Analytics team was established as part of the Analytics Transformation at OSF, with the vision to create a focused functional team that specializes in utilizing advanced analytics techniques including Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive Modeling, Decision Trees, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Image Processing, Simulation & Optimization and robust statistical analysis to serve high-performing care delivery teams and their patients.
The Advanced Analytics team is composed of Data Scientists and Statisticians. At its core, the team focuses on matching the best tools to the project needs and audience. There is a tremendous opportunity at OSF to leverage advanced analytics resources to innovatively enhance the way we care for our patients. To create value for OSF, Advanced Analytics team members closely collaborate with business and clinical leaders to understand the problem, define focus questions, prepare appropriate data, build effective models and implement solutions to enable business and clinical actions guided by model results. Business value is often maximized when the deployment of the model is integrated with clinical workflow to provide prompt or near-real-time opportunity for intervention.
Last Updated: May 2, 2019