Healthcare analytic maturity: 3 Case studies
By Melody Craff
Case Study: Data governance, quality, and accessibility
The challenge
When the senior director at a large state-wide employer organization found herself grappling with how to improve the organization’s data governance and educate team members on how to maintain it, she knew that getting the most out of the data would require changes to culture, processes, and habits. She also knew that the solution needed to ensure data accessibility for everyone, from technically sophisticated coders to goal-oriented executives, as well as managers of programs and teams who need reporting insights to determine priorities. At the outset, data management was often inefficient, duplicative, and siloed. Poor communication between teams, opaque reporting parameters, and inconsistent data sources and definitions often resulted in different answers to the same question. That did not engender trust or productive collaboration.
The solution
The director reached out to the Milliman MedInsight Strategic Services team for their expertise in data analytics, communication, and data governance. The objective: to make their data and its analyses accurate, consistent and accessible to internal stakeholders as well as external individuals and organizations. The solution would require multiple initiatives including data organization and consolidation and dashboard optimization.
Data quality was an early obstacle. The Strategic Services team worked with the client to develop a universal data approach, conducting stakeholder meetings to gather requirements, establish business glossaries, shared definitions and well-maintained data dictionaries supported by documentation, as well as informative metadata. Data quality and consistency began to improve, gradually moving toward a single source of truth.
As the focus transitioned to making data accessible to non-technical data consumers, the MedInsight team emphasized the importance of dashboards that are both visually appealing and intuitive, enabling users to interpret data efficiently without becoming mired in technical complexities.
The client also wanted to be able to share her company’s analyses with external stakeholders and collaborators quickly and seamlessly, while ensuring data security, consistency, and reliability. The Strategic Services team planned and executed a system that provided rapid access to the organization’s analyses by approved third parties, without intermediary technical steps.
The outcome
The company made great progress from its struggle with siloed and varied data management, developing a culture of data governance, advancing its analytic maturity, and setting a benchmark for effective data management and utilization.
Case study: Data quality, documentation and efficiency
The challenge
A lead project manager at a health care information management organization managed a variety of organizations’ employee health data and struggled to process client requests for customized reports and queries. Meanwhile, inadequate documentation in the work of a third-party contractor complicated their data management and process flow. With these challenges in mind, the manager sought help from the Milliman MedInsight Strategic Services team.
Results
As part of a standard series of reports, the manager changed a few subtle details in the dataset as a test of the thoroughness of the team’s data quality processes. The team caught the discrepancies, excluded them from the analyses in the report, and automatically documented the reasons those failed the quality check. The team’s attention to detail and ability to catch small errors in large datasets with quick turnaround earned the manager’s trust and confidence.
The Strategic Services team worked to move the organization toward more mature analytic practices and the ability to adapt to the customization needs of their clients. Unless properly documented, custom reports have an expiration date. To address this, the MedInsight team implemented cataloguing and documentation processes that created cleaner and more easily discernable data queries, while also improving query automation and efficiency to reduce turnaround time. These measures helped the organization provide more straightforward and efficient reporting to their clients and establish the groundwork for improved documentation. Eventually, the organization’s analytics could be transferred to a resource augmentation team for ongoing monthly or quarterly data processing services.
The outcome
The organization built a foundation of mature analytics, addressing the documentation issues and enhancing data quality. The outcome was an organization able to meet client demands more effectively and efficiently, underscoring the importance of meticulous documentation and data quality in achieving analytic maturity.
Case study: Data literacy, education, and common language
The challenge
The manager of the data analytics division of a large regional organization needed to improve shortfalls in data literacy and communication which were affecting data quality and creating missed opportunities for leveraging data insights. The manager was responsible for multiple strategic initiatives that revealed insufficient data literacy, a large volume of staff and leaders who did not feel they knew how to access and use data, and the lack of a common language around data. From the executive perspective, over-customization, data silos, poor documentation and conflicting definitions were a source of inefficiencies that led to confusion and limited the use of data to inform strategic initiatives.
The solution
The manager began working with the Milliman MedInsight Strategic Services team to develop data literacy through custom training courses, focusing on using data in business, driving performance with analytics, data visualization and communication through storytelling with data. Specialized course were also developed to communicate complex concepts such as risk adjustment that impacted the financial and quality outcomes of key programs in the organization.
Results
The licensed Milliman MedInsight Certification and Learning Program® played a vital role in the outcome, ensuring a solid foundation for learners to develop their skills with customized training and courses. With Strategic Services’ guidance and experience in facilitating analytic maturity, the organization made significant progress toward creating a culture of data literacy built around a common language.
About Milliman MedInsight
Milliman MedInsight has helped over 300 healthcare organizations get the most out of their data with solutions that include healthcare payer data analytics and ACO value-based care data analytics tools and processes that enable effective and compelling data storytelling and insights.