Unparalleled Insight Drives Improvement in Hospital Operations, Strategic Planning, Marketing and Patient Care
Healthcare organizations run on information. They not only produce incredible amounts of information every day on everything from supply costs to patient outcomes, they require information to benchmark their performance against their peers and identify opportunities for improvement.
Solucient, part of Thomson Healthcare, is the leading expert at turning data into actionable insights, and is the most trusted source in the healthcare industry for decision-making tools and services that drive business growth, manage costs and help deliver quality care. The Solucient Insight Suite™ offers a comprehensive set of clinical, operational and market solutions that can help healthcare organizations improve all aspects of their business.
Healthcare providers need reliable information and better tools to understand and quantify their business issues and opportunities. Solucient maintains the nation’s largest healthcare database, comprised of more than 26 million discharges per year from 2,900 hospitals – representing 77.5 percent of all discharges.
Solucient uses proprietary methodologies to apply world-class analytics to the data. By transforming data that spans the continuum of healthcare into information that can be acted upon immediately, Solucient ensures its clients are receiving meaningful insights to accurately measure, manage and improve their overall performance. The following are some examples of Solucient’s proven track record as an innovator in supporting growth and quality in healthcare.
Data-Based Planning and Marketing
Solucient has led the way in combining vast quantities of demographic information with inpatient, outpatient and disease data, resulting in powerful marketing and planning tools like The Market Planner® Plus Outpatient Profiles. These marketing and planning products enable hospitals to accurately predict healthcare demand, target high-growth opportunities, forecast the impact of new and emerging technologies and justify capital expenditures.
Outpatient Profiles provides unique insight for targeted outpatient planning and strategy development. This tool accurately quantifies current outpatient volume, including facility-specific procedure comparisons, and procedure volume by diagnosis and by physician specialty. Planners can understand market size and expected growth, learn their competitive position and also identify the key clinical factors and physician specialties that are driving outpatient business.
Consider a hypothetical example about Central City Hospital, which wanted to increase market share and volume for its digestive center. It first identified its current market share and where procedures were being performed. Analysis revealed colonoscopy patients were treated almost equally in physician offices and hospitals in one market, while in another, two-thirds of such patients were treated in physician offices. The hospital also learned which clinical conditions were driving colonoscopy volumes: Colonoscopies were most often performed on patients with digestive and oncology conditions. To ensure an appropriate partnership and referral strategy, the hospital also identified which physician specialties were driving volumes.
As a result, before Central City began courting doctors for hospital-based colonoscopies, the staff understood the effect of physicians’ referral streams and their impact on the hospital’s payer mix. Central City also identified competitors and associated referrals by local doctors before it began marketing its colonoscopy services.
Meeting the Demands of Local Healthcare Consumers
Today’s healthcare consumer is armed with broad information on health-related topics and hospital performance. Understanding changing consumer needs and demands is essential to delivering quality care.
Solucient provides several tools that tap into rich marketing segmentation information – stratifying consumer groups by age, gender and socioeconomic status. HealthView Plus® consumer research helps hospitals identify how healthcare consumers will respond to marketing, and when, where and how they will use specific services.
crmView™ is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that allows organizations to understand healthcare consumer needs and behavior to develop effective marketing campaigns, build awareness among prospective customers and encourage loyalty among current ones. Powerful features – including segmentation, scoring models, treatment management, campaign building, response tracking and campaign analysis – enable healthcare organizations to identify and understand unique patient groups and prioritize efforts.
crmView combines the industry's leading consumer research with CRM best practices, Internet reporting and HouseholdView™, Solucient's proprietary healthcare segmentation system. HouseholdView divides healthcare consumers into 56 separate segments, allowing marketers to develop specific messages for precisely targeted audiences.
BJC Healthcare of St. Louis,Mo., wanted to track revenue generated as a result of its marketing campaigns. They used crmView to create a database of all their marketing activities matched to clinical and nonclinical information on specific customers going back several years. Each customer's experience with the hospital was recorded in the database and linked back to the relevant campaign. By using crmView to launch more than 300 direct marketing campaigns, BJC Healthcare has been able to convert campaign respondents into customers at a rate 25 percent higher than the rate at which control members have been converted.
Assessing Performance, Charting an Improvement Pathway
In response to growing public pressure to reduce medical errors and increase access to care while operating more costeffectively, Solucient offers an ambitious and complete suite of clinical tools for performance assessment and quality improvement. The clinical suite can help healthcare providers discover opportunities, detect causes, decrease variance and manage resources, while meeting regulatory and public accountability requirements.
With Solucient’s powerful clinical tools, users gain access to a network of other healthcare professionals to share and compare information on best practices, processes and techniques for overcoming challenges. These clients can analyze and compare complication, mortality and readmission rates, as well as patient outcomes for clinical services, against national, regional and peer groups. The CareDiscovery™ also includes benchmarks to current top-performing hospitals based on the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals® methodology.
Georgia-based Gwinnett Health System (GHS) used HBSI EXPLORE® to drive change and performance improvement throughout the GHS system. EXPLORE’s comparative data allowed senior management to go into line details and highlight differences between GHS performance and that of other community-based health systems. Armed with knowledge gained from EXPLORE, GHS implemented a collaborative approach to change with physicians and staff that fostered cooperation and buy-in throughout the organization. As a result, GHS initiated improvements that could be quantified in the bottom line as well as in physician, staff and patient satisfaction.
Benchmarking Toward Excellence
Recognizing the need for hospitals to prosper despite the growing pressures of public reporting and pay for performance, Solucient has pioneered a comprehensive database for the industry.
ACTION O-I® operational improvement program offers the largest comparative healthcare information database in the industry, with financial and operational data from more than 850 healthcare organizations across the country. With ACTION O-I, hospitals and health systems can compare performance across the industry at the system, hospital and department level to help identify key opportunities for financial improvement. Information from the program can also be used to support budgets, staffing projections, reimbursement issues and capital investments.
ACTION O-I gives hospitals a clear window into their own financial and operational performance. It provides an opportunity for facilities to benchmark themselves against peers of similar size, payer mix, geography, patient population and other measures.
In addition to this quantitative data, ACTION O-I users have access to a substantial library of qualitative content. ACTION O-I Evidence-Based Information, developed in partnership with Zynx Health™, is a vital resource of current evidence from peerreviewed and operationally oriented literature. Evidence-Based Information goes beyond best practice information to offer multiple specific insights for key departments and is the only ROI-focused, evidencebased information product dedicated to healthcare operations.
Saint Thomas Hospital of Nashville, Tenn., used ACTION O-I to cut overall salary expenses and overtime while ending reliance on contract labor for the hospital’s radiology department. By tracking procedures and converting them to relative value units (RVUs), the staff cut overtime hours as a percentage of total paid hours from 7.3 percent in fiscal 2003 to 3.5 percent in fiscal 2006. Additionally, contract labor was virtually eliminated, with outside labor hours as a percentage of total paid hours plummeting from 11.6 percent in 2003 to 0 percent in March 2006.
Take the Next Step
Discover how Solucient can help your hospital drive business growth, manage costs and help deliver quality care. Contact your Solucient sales representative, or visit our website at www.thomsonhealthcare.com.
