Survey: Healthcare Orgs Focusing on Clinical Outcomes Have Higher Success with Analytics

According to a survey of 109 senior healthcare leaders, organizations that focus on clinical outcomes as their key ROI metric—rather than financial returns or staff efficiency—rank higher across the board in terms of usage of analytics across the enterprise, average number of metrics used, measured success rate, and overall effectiveness of analytics.

The research, conducted by analytics solution company Dimensional Insight, along with HIMSS Analytics, set out to examine how healthcare organizations implement metrics and measure ROI from their analytics programs.

Key survey findings include:

• Of organizations that are leveraging analytics, 84 percent are doing so in multiple areas (clinical, financial, operational), while two-thirds are leveraging analytics across the organization.
• Organizations feel their analytics solutions have been most effective towards improving financial performance, but they have been able to see the most measured success with clinical analytics (78 percent) vs. financial analytics (74 percent) or operational analytics (70 percent).
• The primary method organizations use to determine ROI is most often financial returns and improvements (41 percent) vs. clinical outcome improvement (37 percent), staff efficiency (13 percent), or measured improvements across the patient journey (4 percent).
• However, they see the highest measured success rate (75 percent) if they use clinical outcomes improvement as their primary metric.

“As healthcare organizations move to value-based payment models, they are finding that focusing on clinical metrics, including readmission rates, infection control, and patient outcome improvements is critical for success,” George Dealy, vice president of healthcare solutions at Dimensional Insight, said in a statement. “Analytics provides tremendous insight into these areas and can benefit healthcare organizations that are navigating this transition.”