Ask the expert: Dr. Staci Rogers on data

CoxHealth is committed to a culture of innovation and agility, and that means being able to make effective, informed decisions, and make them quickly.

How do we know where our best opportunities lie? How do we know if the changes we make are creating the outcomes we want? The answer lies within timely, understandable data.

“When we are thinking about change moving forward, data is key,” says Dr. Staci Rogers, CoxHealth’s Chief Transformation Officer. “It is hard to see opportunities and to know that we are being successful if we don’t have the data to back it up.”

Making quality data accessible and actionable is vital to CoxHealth’s mission. That’s why Dr. Rogers is leading an effort to improve our approach to data – developing systems that will allow our physicians and leaders to have trusted information that can be easily accessed and understood.

That data will help us make clinical improvements for our patients and process improvements for our teams. And, it will let us see the trends and outliers we need to be aware of as we set the stage for where health care is going next.

Dr. Rogers recently took a few minutes to talk with us about data and change – here is what she had to say:

Consolidating data into a ‘single source of truth’

As an industry, health care collects a lot of data, from clinical information, to operational metrics, to financial data. Unfortunately, that data is spread across different systems and departments, and it requires a lot of effort to collect and interpret it.

“We identified data alignment as an opportunity for the system. We saw the chance to assess the platforms we currently have and the data points that are available to us,” says Dr. Rogers. “By strategically bringing together people, platforms, and processes from multiple departments, we decrease the chance of misaligned information and create a standard source of truth.”

CoxHealth gathered a group of leaders to define the problem and develop a plan to bring the puzzle pieces together.

Aligning CoxHealth’s data to a more cohesive system allows us to continue to provide high-quality care for our patients while meeting financial goals.

“We need our colleagues to have access to timely, actionable data they can trust,” Dr. Rogers says. “Our goal is to take the mountains of data produced across our system and turn it into actionable insight for our teams.”

Aligning data and teams

CoxHealth is assessing the current state of our data by asking: What are the platforms we have available? What are the reports that are currently in our system, and what are the data points our leaders need? Finally, what do we need to adapt to make it easier for leaders to make decisions for their teams and the overall business?

This assessment gave CoxHealth a crucial opportunity to bring teams together from across the system – allowing the system to align standard metrics and measure success the same way.

“Traditionally, we spread data analytics resources across departments. We had an analytics arm for Si3, CMG informatics, Healthcare Analytics, Revenue Integrity and more. We had to work to bring those teams together,” Dr. Rogers says.

“We put together a plan to evolve those historically siloed teams into one Enterprise Data and Analytics department under a single leader, our new Administrative Director of Data and Analytics, Martha Ross. We wanted to understand their skillsets, who their customers are across the system, and how we can align their efforts.

“By aligning our teams, we will be able to connect the data. We are able eliminate duplication of work for, eliminate conflicts between data from different sources that didn’t match, and ultimately deliver greater value to the organization.”

Dr. Rogers’ team identified three main categories of data: clinical, financial and operational.

Clinical data

The data gathered on the clinical side allows us to track care quality metrics. Dr. Shawn Usery, CoxHealth’s Chief Medical Officer, is leading this project with an analytics team to work with side-by-side.

“When we define clinical quality, we want to ensure that we are all using the same definitions and create an understanding across the board. We will use standard metrics, many of which are externally reported, and ensure they will be easily accessible in a digestible way for our clinical leaders to work with,” says Dr. Rogers.

Financial data

CoxHealth’s financial leaders are defining standard key performance indicators that should be visible to all leaders. The indicators will help us define what success looks like in each of our business units, and our data analytics approach will make those metrics easily accessible so leaders can see how we are performing.

Operational data

As presented at the Leadership Summit in November, we are aligning with the “Enterprise Scorecard” – a regularly updated dashboard that includes the metrics that we are currently measuring at the system level for all of our leaders.

“Our plan will be to take those data points and build them into a scorecard so that any leader can see how they are performing and supporting the operational and strategic goals of the system.”

The scorecard is organized around our new strategic priorities. It includes metrics around our patients, customers and workforce, metrics on how we perform as an organization, and metrics on how we are performing financially.

Future state: an enterprise data warehouse

In the past, we have relied on our leaders and analytics teams to pull information from different systems and then manually compile it into actionable insight, which has caused some of the challenges we are facing today.

Our teams are currently building an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) where many of our data points can be consolidated, and reports can be more easily created and automated using data from disparate systems.

“From the unified platform, we can pull data to create visual dashboards and tools in a more automated fashion. This replaces hours of manual work – by leaders or analysts – of taking different reports and manually pulling together insights,” Dr. Rogers says.

“Leaders may now have to collect data and reports from different areas to create a synopsis of the information they need. The EDW will make the process automated for the metrics leaders reference regularly. This will free up our teams and give leaders the ability to make data-driven decisions with data that is timely, trustworthy and accessible. With our analysts not doing the manual input from different sources, they will be able to monitor trends and look for variations that need to be investigated.”

Driving our strategic journey

While our efforts to improve data analytics are a journey, and projects like the EDW will take time, CoxHealth is in a good position with the consolidation of our analysts and our processes around data.

Our new strategic plan gives us clear direction on where we want to go, and the data will help us understand how to get there and measure success along the way.

“This will create more opportunity for us to be data-driven in our decision making,” Dr. Rogers says. “Many times, we have to make a fast decision, and in the past those may have been made on gut feelings because there is not enough time to manually compile the data. Our new process and the EDW, with its regular access to consolidated data, will change that.”

As we get better at managing data, it will be easier to see trends, and to ask questions that will move us forward.

“It allows leaders to ask questions or thing critically about how they can improve their work and their departments,” Dr. Rogers says. “And it frees our analysts up form manual work. That allows them to be a true resource for our leaders, collaborating to spot trends and digging in to understand new opportunities.”

Dr. Rogers says making data-driven decisions will benefit our day-to-day operations, and set the stage for long-term success.

“Having good, timely data supports our vision for the future of the organization. It supports our mission of providing good care for our patients and meeting financial goals,” she says. “I am so excited about the direction we are going.”