Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota is one of the largest pediatric health systems in the United States, with 2 hospitals, 12 primary and specialty care clinics, and 6 rehabilitation sites. It is the only health system in Minnesota to provide care exclusively to children from before birth through young adulthood.
Situation
Children’s Minnesota has always excelled at collecting valuable data. Its volumes, however, were too unwieldy for reporting. End users waited days and often weeks for reports, many of which were out of date and irrelevant by the time they became available. Pulling actionable insights out of its vast volume of health care data became a daunting task. The organization wanted to make information more readily available to staff through a self-service business intelligence (BI) model. It recognized the value in QlikView but lacked the internal resources and skill sets needed to leverage the solution. The organization partnered with Wipfli.
Strategy
Children's Minnesota’s leadership had established a data-driven vision and needed Wipfli’s assistance in refining the vision and documenting the existing gaps. Wipfli interviewed key stakeholders and teams throughout the hospital and used the insights combined with best practices to document Children’s Minnesota’s BI model. In support, Wipfli made strategic recommendations on what tools, training, and governance were needed and what types of analysis would complement what the leadership team had already put in place to serve the hospital’s business needs. Wipfli then built a dozen applications including:
- Surge application—Identifies and helps anticipate the onset of the seasonal flu “surge” by monitoring patient flow in emergency rooms in order to track and detect trends.
- Surgery application—Analyzes and tracks data across the hospital’s three surgery centers, with key metrics for operations and financials, either as a whole or as separate units.
- Strategy application—Validates and supports the hospital’s business development decisions.
Benefits
Employees no longer submit a request for data then wait for reports to come through. Now everyone has the same information at their fingertips thanks to more than 30 QlikView apps being used. The apps are creating efficiencies and saving money by eliminating the need to gather and distribute information.
Beyond having better decision-making support, the quality of those decisions has also been improved. For example, the surge app helps nursing groups manage through high-census periods, making them more prepared to care for patients. The surgery app has provided the hospital with a way to identify volume trends, market shifts, and provider shifts as well as changes in referral patterns.
Providing such data transparency has been the most important benefit. Children’s Minnesota gives its people information and data as quickly as it can, empowering users to make better data-backed decisions.
