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Business analytics insight within easy reach

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Anne Ford

July 2015—It used to be that business analytic solutions came only from LIS or enterprise-wide vendors, accessing these solutions meant going through the IT department, and laboratories’ requests to join the business analytics party frequently fell to the bottom of the priority pile.

Forget “used to be.” Now, says Hal Weiner of Weiner Consulting Services LLC, in Eugene, Ore., “new tools have been developed by third-party vendors to make it much easier for labs themselves to create their own dashboards, their own queries, and their own monitoring tools.” And interest in business analytics is high among health care executives. A survey last year by Price Waterhouse Cooper of 1,344 health care CEOs found that 68 percent had concrete plans to implement business analytics or had undertaken or completed an implementation. An additional 22 percent were developing a strategy to implement, Weiner reported in a presentation in May at the Pathology Informatics Summit (a presentation developed in tandem with Dennis Winsten of Dennis Winsten and Associates, Tucson, Ariz.). In the talk and in a CAP TODAY interview, Weiner discussed what to consider in evaluating and implementing business analytics tools and reviewed acquisition and pricing options.

First, he provided several illustrations of how laboratories can use dashboards and reports from various analytics companies.

Courtesy of Viewics. Example does not contain real data.

Courtesy of Viewics. Example does not contain real data.

“What this is doing,” he says of Fig. 1, “is looking at clients whose volume has decreased by 30 percent, so I can find out who’s not giving me business” (see “Use Case: Client/Physician Management”).

“I want to look at what tests, what revenue, what’s the differentiation in the account from month to month, from client to client, because decreasing volume is a leading predictor that those clients might go somewhere else.” A business analytics tool can help a laboratory see what tests its customers are ordering and not ordering. “It can alert you when your client has had a practice variation, it can tell you what tests are being improperly utilized, and it can prompt you to reach out to your clients to determine what’s going on and give you suggestions to retain their business.”

Business analytics tools can help laboratories not only preserve revenue but also increase customer satisfaction. “If you’re a service organization, you want to provide absolutely the best service to your clients,” Weiner says. “You want to be able to turn around calls quickly when clients complain about issues.” Referring to Fig. 2, “Case Management,” he says: “This is a way to manage issue resolution for both your internal and external clients. The people who are leading the client service organization can look at this and ensure their group is providing service by tracking issue resolution, the root cause, the correct action, the length of time it took to resolve the issues. And then by proactively addressing those issues, at-risk clients can be reduced and relationships can be expanded.”

Courtesy of HC1.com. Example does not contain real data.

Courtesy of HC1.com. Example does not contain real data.

Some business analytics systems, he says, include a customer relationship module and can integrate to an existing laboratory information system. “What this lets you do is not only look at the volume of work but also at how well you are servicing your top clients.”

Then, too, business analytics has much to offer in the reference testing arena. Fig. 3, “Use Case: Reference Testing,” shows where volume is going, how much work is going outside the laboratory, what kinds of tests they are, the top tests by test and by client, which tests it makes sense to perform internally rather than send out. “This also lets you look at what send-out tests physicians are ordering for which there is a good in-house substitute,” Weiner says. “Maybe there are tests that don’t really need to be ordered. So one could look at defining best practices for certain sets of orders, especially in genomics testing, so that you can set appropriate test-ordering processes within your organization and significantly reduce the cost and the waste that may happen in that area.”

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