-- Advanced analytics of SASŪ Performance Management for Healthcare improves patient care and satisfaction --

13 December 2004 -

Accelerating the delivery of lab results to emergency room physicians. Increasing the number of intensive care patients transferred to the hospital from nearby community healthcare centres. Sending patients home sooner once they're healthy enough to leave. These are goals of the performance services team at Duke University Hospital of Durham, North Carolina, whose members are responsible for integrating performance metrics and Six Sigma performance improvement initiatives to improve patient care and satisfaction.

"We want to take our performance management program beyond reports of metrics and simple calculations of averages and percentages," said Bill Burton, the hospital's director of performance services. "When you are dealing with clinical quality and other issues facing healthcare providers, it is critically important to understand why certain key performance indicators have changed since the previous quarter. That is why we turned to SAS."

SAS revs up performance improvement with powerful analytics, user-friendly access
In 2001, administrators at Duke University Hospital launched a performance improvement program by adopting a balanced scorecard approach that focuses on four key areas: quality of care, patient satisfaction, employee training and satisfaction, and financial performance. These scorecards helped link hospital strategies and goals to key performance indicators (KPIs) that demonstrate the hospital teams' progress toward meeting their goals.

For instance, sometimes personnel in the hospital's transfer centre reluctantly have to deny transfers from other community hospitals because all of the beds in the intensive care units (ICUs) are already full. A Six Sigma team examined the reasons for these denials and worked side by side with individual clinical service unit teams to identify ways to reduce the number of denials. By increasing the availability of "step-down" beds for patients no longer requiring the full services of an ICU, expanding medical director oversight of the transfer process and implementing an electronic measurement tool that allows more accurate collection of data in real time, Duke University Hospital was able to reduce the number of denials due to lack of beds by 65 percent.

Traditionally, Duke University Hospital has relied on spreadsheets to create scorecards that measured and analysed key measurements such as the number of denials due to the lack of available beds. While these scorecards have improved hospital performance in a number of areas, progress had slowed due to the limitations inherent in using spreadsheets. Scorecards don't allow users to drill down and see the numbers feeding into the key performance indicators. Data feeding into the spreadsheets resides on disparate systems that are not linked. Scorecards report what happened without ascertaining why it happened. Also, scorecards must be updated by hand, a time-consuming process that can introduce errors.

"The scorecards provided by SAS show us what is working well and what requires improvement," Burton explained. "Six Sigma provides a framework for evaluating pertinent issues and making improvements, and then the scorecards come into play again with reports and analysis of the results of our Six Sigma efforts."

About Duke University Hospital
A tertiary and quaternary-care hospital, Duke University Hospital is consistently rated one of the top hospitals in the United States. It houses comprehensive diagnostic and therapeutic facilities including a regional emergency/trauma centre; a major surgery suite with dedicated open-heart operating rooms; an endosurgery centre; and an extensive diagnostic radiology area. The facility also functions as a research hospital where medical advances are achieved and applied and as a teaching hospital for students of medicine, nursing, and the allied health sciences.