Children’s Hospital Colorado is the first children’s hospital to achieve Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics Adoption Model for Analytics Maturity, joining elite company among just three other providers to gain the same advanced distinction.

WHY IT MATTERS
The AMAM is an eight-stage model to help hospitals and health systems assess and track their data and analytics capabilities.

At the lowest rung, Stage 0, providers make little to no use of their clinical and operational data – perhaps some basic usage of Excel files, for example, but no significant analytics capabilities, according to HIMSS Analytics.

Hospitals that put in the work to reach Stage 7, however, are eventually able to systematize the people, process and technology changes needed to attain predictive and prescriptive insights enterprise-wide.

To earn Stage 7, employees from across Children’s Colorado, but especially at its Analytics Resource Center, worked to develop, expand and extend analytics capabilities in 93 different analytical functions.

It then submitted three case studies to HIMSS Analytics focused on some of the operational, financial and clinical gains enabled by those data-driven improvements. HIMSS Analytics surveyors also visited four departments at the Children’s Colorado – two clinical, two non-clinical – to see the data-driven culture at work.

THE LARGER TREND
Reaching AMAM Stage 7 is no easy task, and few hospitals have yet accomplished it – the others, so far, are University of North Carolina Healthcare, DukeHealth and Rush University Medical Center. (You can read their case studies here.) But more and more health systems are seeing the value of analytics and improvement-driven culture.

In a 2018 interview with Healthcare IT News, Jason Burke, UNC's system vice president and chief analytics officer, offered some tips for other providers aiming to scale the heights of analytics maturity. These include fostering a "collaborative dialogue between business and clinical and technology staff, investing heavily in data governance and more generally challenging the status quo and thinking very intentionally about why things are done the way they are.

"Every organization is in their own place in their journey toward this," said Burke. "But again, I don't think it's optional. This is the way medicine should be practiced, and we're finally at a tipping point."

ON THE RECORD
“Everything we do at Children’s Colorado is designed to improve outcomes and experiences for patients, and our approach to data analytics is no exception,” said Kerri Webster, chief analytics officer at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

"We are able to use data to tell team members throughout the organization what will happen and what they can do about it," she said. "This recognition from HIMSS Analytics simply validates our team’s commitment to doing the best for our patients and their families.”