A longtime leader in healthcare improvement, we’re developing new ways to revolutionize the industry.
Challenges often accelerate innovation—and in the era of COVID-19, the need for system-wide agility, integration and transformation are vital.
The healthcare landscape continues to evolve, and to remain competitive, organizations must find ways to reduce costs without sacrificing quality of care.
With renewed pressure on margins, consumer expectations and the electronic health record morphing into a clinical operations requirement, providers simply cannot rely on a traditional, incremental approach to performance improvement.
They need a transformative process that uses data-driven expertise and technology to improve and sustain the gains.
McLaren Health Care recognizes the importance of improving margin, and at the same time, driving stronger clinical care delivery. The Michigan-based system, which includes 15 hospitals and a 490-member physician network, first engaged Premier in 2018 to coalesce its disparate data sources into a cohesive and accessible analytics infrastructure.
Over the next 18 months, McLaren is partnering with Premier to build a customized technology platform, inclusive of industry-wide benchmarking capabilities, robust business intelligence solutions and rich data analytics. This powerful engine will drive the clinical operating model to reduce clinical variation and unwarranted costs—and enable broader, more meaningful and more sustainable operational improvements.
By shaping its margin improvement plan around the clinical operating model, McLaren will level up its ability to:
McLaren CFO Dave Mazurkiewicz recently joined the Premier team for a Modern Healthcare webinar to discuss the Premier partnership to date as well as a look ahead at this important clinical redesign and margin improvement work. Check out the webinar here.
Let’s take a detailed look at the elements central to this strategy:
Integrated Technology
Technology sits at the core of nearly every modern advancement, but true integration of healthcare technology—which hinges on effective management and meaningful interpretation of data analytics across an organization—often remains elusive for health systems.
And yet, integrated technology underpins sustainable performance improvement. It should:
Advanced business intelligence and analytics alongside integrated technology empower organizations with data-driven decision making and speed-to-value as a single source of truth.
A Strong Clinical Focus
Health systems that comprehensively review the fundamentals of their clinical operating model—including clinical governance and variation, care delivery models, service line strategy, physician engagement and more—will see deeper and broader improvement in their overall operational functions.
How? A focus on clinical redesign drives deeper and broader improvement in overall operational functions, including:
Providers that rely on a robust business intelligence and data analytics ecosystem to review their clinical operating model will find that its strength predicates the success of the rest of the organization. This broader view aids organizations in overall quality improvement—weeding out unnecessary or excess services, additional costs and diminished outcomes.
With a strong clinical focus in mind, providers like McLaren and those in Premier’s quality improvement collaborative work together to reduce clinical variation and improve care quality across 37 states. Utilizing this powerhouse suite of integrated benchmarking and analytics tools, they transparently share, measure and scale best practices. In fact, providers using Premier technology score 21% higher in their Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings and 9% higher in HCAHPS ratings.
A holistic and technology-enabled view of the clinical operating model yields substantial benefits to organizations.
Managing and improving margins in healthcare is a strategic imperative as the industry navigates a global pandemic and transitions to value-based care and payment models. A common challenge providers encounter when undergoing a transformation initiative is fragmentation, or the inability to connect various departments and teams in a way that gives leaders the tools and insights to transform together.
To overcome this challenge, decision-makers need trusted data analytics, insights and expertise across their ecosystem that are backed by a strong technology platform. Integrated technology combined with a clinically focused approach to transformation enables providers to flourish now and in the future.
Learn more about how Premier’s technology-enabled, clinically integrated approach is transforming care delivery by way of better outcomes and financial health.