Real-time analytics key to Providence Health's 'value infrastructure'

EVP Amy Compton-Phillips says the West Coast health system is leveraging real-time data and informatics to improve patient outcomes, while reducing care costs.

When Providence Health and Services began its shift into value-based care and improving patient outcomes, it turned to its data and assessed what other innovators were doing in Silicon Valley, according to its Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer Amy Compton-Phillips, MD.

The non-profit system operates multiple hospitals across state lines on the West Coast, and as a result, Compton-Phillips said Providence has a pretty massive data pool. And for each aspect of the health system’s mission, leveraging that data becomes crucial to transforming patient care.

“Strategically, we’re here to make lives better,” Compton-Phillips said. “Not only the people we care for, but also the outcomes in the community.”

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To accomplish this, Compton-Phillips said Providence is targeting key areas to “strengthen the core of what we do in a traditional health system model and become a real community health partner beyond the border of bricks and mortar.”

“The best way to be the future is to create it,” she said. “Within each focus, we leverage data and analytics to execute on these strategies …. By drawing on Silicon Valley innovations happening outside of the healthcare sector, it’s opened our approach to how we handle patient care.”

Specifically, Providence brought in an informaticist to create a clinical infrastructure based on the data link already in place at the health system. The new analytics system provided real-time quality data and what Compton-Phillips called a “value infrastructure.”

For example, the new infrastructure now pulls all information associated with the cost of care and places it right into the provider’s workflow. Compton-Phillips said this can be compared to clinical outcomes by using just one filter within the EHR.

“Just by making those visible, we’ve had incredible engagement by our clinicians,” said Compton-Phillips.

As Providence and other providers begin to start thinking about how to deliver high-value care at lower costs, transparency and provider engagement is key. To Compton-Phillips, community partnerships can also work to drive these results.

Providence is in the early stages of using analytics to build community healthcare partnerships. For example, by leveraging its data, Compton-Phillips said her team has assessed the key drivers of morbidity and mortality to determine where Providence needs to invest to reduce disease.

Its site -- Community Commons -- gives Providence a visual on the needs of the community using data like mental health, abuse, obesity and the like to determine what drives its patient population.

Using this data and community partnerships, such as those with prisons, police departments and schools, Compton-Phillips said Providence can make sure it’s helping build healthier communities.

Providence is also working to determine how genomics data can transform the future and drive data in a different way. However initially, it was was difficult to easily pull information from its Epic EHR. So Providence built a real-time clone of the data pulled from its Epic system, explained Compton-Phillips.

“The system closed the gap in real-time to make big changes,” said Compton-Phillips. “It’s something a provider could do if Epic were a more current data infrastructure. Bringing in all of this data has been helping us.”

In the future, Providence hopes that it becomes easier to give patients their data really engage them with their care. Compton-Phillips said that these patient-reported outcomes can provide the health system with data, which, in turn, can be given back to patients as it’s accumulated.

“We’re building something with dense dynamic data clouds,” said Compton-Phillips. “Over time, through scientific wellness promotion, we’ll be able to help patients by looking at their lab tests and genetic profile to determine the things they need to do to become healthier and change their care.”

“Transparency allows patients to see how others with similar situations fared with certain treatments to determine their own course of care for a certain illness,” she added.

Further, Providence is working on several studies on disparate areas to determine if it can change outcomes through better data.

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Twitter: @JessieFDavis
Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com

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