By Gene Koch

How Behavioral Health is Using Acute Care Hospital Discharge Data for Strategy and Growth

How Behavioral Health is Using Acute Care Hospital Discharge Data for Strategy and Growth

Once upon a time, behavioral healthcare facilities were islands – relatively separate from the rest of the healthcare landscape and not seeking out healthcare data analytics to inform strategy.

That has changed.

With continued consolidation across markets and steady movement toward value-based care, behavioral healthcare organizations are recognizing the need for the right data to make smart decisions about their organization’s strategy and growth. Additionally, competition within behavioral health is increasing and building relationships with acute care hospitals is essential.

Using Hospital Discharge Data for Behavioral Health

We are working with more and more behavioral health organizations – both single state and multi-state facilities – who are needing reliable hospital discharge data to support strategic planning and develop outreach plans for increasing market share.

Data that behavioral health facilities are interested in obtaining from IntelliClient™:

• Specific, behavioral health diagnosis and procedure codes that show volume of psychiatric admissions for treatment.
• Identifying the source of admission – physician referral and emergency department are the main sources.
• Locating the zip codes where psychiatric patients come from.
• Identifying discharge status – Went home? Long-term care? Behavioral health facility?
• Pinpointing specific discharging physicians to develop relationships with.

Here’s how behavioral health facilities are using this data for strategy and marketing™:

• Building relationships with hospitals with high psychiatric patient volume for direct referrals and admissions.
• Creating and nurturing relationships with attending physicians who are discharging to behavioral health facilities.
• Understanding market opportunities for establishing or acquiring a behavioral health facility located near an acute care hospital that has high psychiatric admissions.
• Using the demographic data provided by IntelliClient™ along with the hospital discharge data to investigate and map the dynamics of a given market.
• The demographic data provides important information related to a given market such as age, gender, ethnicity, income and a 5-year population growth projection for each of these categories.

Behavioral health is looking for ways to grow its business outside of the traditional ways as this market becomes more competitive. Decision-making informed by data will help behavioral health organizations know the acute care hospitals and physicians best positioned to grow relationships with. Data will also help to inform long-term and costly decisions such as new facilities and acquisitions.

Want to learn more? Contact us.

Gene Kochis Chief Operating Officer for Intellimed.

By Admin

Red Carpet Customer Service: User Experience (UX) & Customer Experience (CX) in Healthcare Information Technology

We all know how important the user experience (UX) is in designing and evolving a healthcare information technology solution. We know that it’s important to design health IT solutions that are easy and intuitive to navigate and provide users with the information they seek.

Of course, as a healthcare data analytics technology company, we certainly appreciate and are mindful of the user experience when designing new products and evolving our existing solutions. But what about the human side of the user experience – the customer experience (CX)? In today’s uber-techie world, many companies are foregoing high-touch CX experiences in favor of email support, live chat and other technology-enabled support. And, for some products, that works just fine.

But for an industry like ours where we are serving healthcare analysts up to the C-suite within healthcare systems who rely on our data for business decisions with multi-million-dollar impact, support can’t end at UX. UX must be tied to meaningful customer experience (CX) to create a red carpet customer service approach.

Defining User Experience (UX)

UX is the customer’s experience with the technology, in our case our claims data analytics solution. UX is centered solely around the solution’s usability, structure, navigation and ease-of-use – all highly important. The ultimate goal of UX boils down to designing a product that efficiently and enjoyably meets the user’s needs.

Defining Customer Experience (CX)

Whereas UX is confined to the user’s experience within the technology, CX is broader in scope to include the customer’s experience with all aspects of the company, including:

• Customer service
• The sales process
• Pricing
• Branding and marketing
• Company operations
• Product delivery and updates

UX + CX = The Ultimate User Experience

Before the fancy UX and CX acronyms for user and customer experience came around, at Intellimed – for 35+ years – we have been rooted in two things:

• Providing the best-managed and most insightful claims data in the industry
• Offering a high touch solution-focused customer service experience

So, CX has long been part of our DNA. With our newest product IntelliMarket™, we are adding additional emphasis on UX with the goal of providing a customer experience that merges the best of both user and customer experience.

Here are some ways we have and will continue to support the full user experience:

• Multiple points of contact:Our clients have access to not just their designated account representative, but to multiple points of contact within our company, including developers; data specialists; sales and operations; as well as our management team.Two of our company’s core values are to be relationship-focusedand responsive. To that end, we work hard to make it as easy as possible for our customers to reach who they need to reach for what they need when they need to – they do not need to go through layers of support wasting their time and energy.
• Client-focused mindset:We are always asking the question “How can we make our clients’ jobs easier?” Being a data analyst within a hospital system comes with stress and pressure. From managers up to the C-suite, people are relying on the data teams to deliver insights from our solutions to inform strategic business decisions. We strive to stay in touch our analysts and ask questions to understand their pain points. We know first-hand that data teams have slept overnight at their jobs and worked long weekends to meet data deadlines for critical reporting. When we receive an SOS from an analyst, we take it seriously and collaborate until the problem is resolved or the necessary information is in-hand – hopefully avoiding as many long nights and weekends at the office, as possible.

Collaborative Product Development:

IntelliMarket™ was developed in collaboration with our customers, who helped create the use cases, test the product and provide critical feedback. As we iterate IntelliMarket™ as well as our original IntelliClient™  solutions, we will continue to seek our customer’s critical input along the way.

Nathan Schnell is Vice President of Service Delivery at Intellimed. 

By Admin

Intellimed Volunteer Day with Feed My Starving Children

Intellimed Volunteer Day with Feed My Starving Children

Our team had a great time taking a day off this week to volunteer with Feed My Starving Children, a national organization dedicated to providing nutritious meals to children worldwide. While we all work hard at Intellimed and it’s not always easy to find time to take a day to volunteer like this, we always find it’s well worth it for the contributions made and time together as a team.

Here’s the stats from our volunteer day:

• 214 boxes packed
• 46,224 meals
• 126 kids feed for a year

By Trisha Young

SHSMD 2017 Highlights and Key Takeaways

SHSMD 2017 Highlights and Key Takeaways

Intellimed recently attend the American Hospital Association’s Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) annual conference – SHSMD Connections – in Orlando on September 24-27, 2017.

The event provides a fantastic opportunity for healthcare marketing, public relations and communications and strategic planning professionals to come together to exchange ideas, learn about new product innovations and network.

Many of Intellimed’s clients attend this event and are the individuals within their organizations who use our healthcare data analytics solutions daily, notably our IntelliClient.

In this day-and-age of fast and furious email communication, social media and information abundance via the Internet, attending an event like SHSMD is a breath of fresh air. It allows us to:

• Share our product improvements with our current and prospective clients.
• Hear about customer and prospect challenges and how we may be able to help address them with our tools.
• Gain insights into how we can make improvements to our solutions to meet changing market needs.
• Reinforce Intellimed’s commitment to a high-quality, high-touch approach to healthcare data analytics solutions.
• Learn about other products and services in the healthcare data analytics market.

Here are some highlights and key takeaways from the SHSMD event:

• Intellimed enjoyed participating with 140 other exhibitors, providing conference attendees with industry-leading services and solutions.
• Lots of fun pictures over on SHSMD’s conference Facebook page.
• Cocktails before the opening keynote along with the crowd being serenaded by local a cappella group reVoiced – a nice change from the standard conference kick-off activities.
• Opening keynote speaker, Ceci Connolly, President and CEO at theAlliance of Community Health Plans, who discussed healthcare’s biggest challenges – from high-deductible plans to rising drug prices to payer consolidation. Ceci offered many new and insightful perspectives on these challenging issues.
• Some reoccurring themes throughout the event:
  • Accountability matters among providers and patients with focus on design thinking, population health, appointment follow-up communications, digital tools and more personalization
  • Consumers continue to expect experiences in healthcare on par with what they’ve come to expect from other industries and healthcare must rise to the occasion.
  • Marketers must measure ROI – a common healthcare pain point – with emphasis on marketing as a profit versus cost center.
  • Marketing must continue to move toward digital with emphasis on using technology to measure outcomes and track data, which the C-suite demands.
  • Mobile matters and patient experiences must be tailored to it from search to the experience a patient has on a hospital’s website.

Kudos to SHSMD for another great event!

Intellimed looks forward to attending next year, which given the fast-paced changes happening in healthcare, will again prove to be enjoyable and insightful.

By Admin

Predictive Analytics in Healthcare: Trends, Challenges and Why We Need It

Predictive Analytics in Healthcare: Trends, Challenges and Why We Need It

Data from the National Academy of Medicine shows that the U.S. healthcare system spends $750 billion annually – almost a third of its resources – on unnecessary services and inefficient care.

Predictive analytics tools, long used in other industries like retail to forecast the likelihood of an event, are one of the critical tools for reducing healthcare waste and improving patient care and outcomes.

A 2017 survey by the Society of Actuaries looked at the trends in use and future use of predictive analytics in healthcare:

• 57% of executives (providers and payers) forecast predictive analytics will save their organization 15% or more over the next 5 years, with 26% forecasting saving 25% or more over the next five years.
• 47% of providers currently use predictive analytics.
• 93% say predictive analytics is important to the future of their business.
• Providers cite patient satisfaction as the most valuable outcome for using predictive analytics.
• Payers cite controlling costs as the most valuable outcome for use of predictive analytics.

Despite what seems like strong support from this data, there are major barriers to the adoption of predictive analytics in healthcare.

Challenges to Using Predictive Analytics in Healthcare

The top 5 challenges for implementing predictive analytics from the Society of Actuaries study are:

• Lack of budget – 16%
• Regulatory issues (e.g. HIPAA) – 13%
• Incomplete data – 12%
• Lack of skilled employees – 11%
• Lack of sufficient technology – 10%

In addition, a recent Harvard Business Review article notes that the success of predictive analytics in healthcare depends less on the tool used and more on the buy-in at all levels of an organization from the start. The authors cite the following major challenges:

• Engaging the right people from the outset – Whether the tool is developed in-house or purchased off-the-shelf, the right people should be involved in the process, with a multi-disciplinary team comprised of clinical, analytics, data science, information technology and behavior change skill sets.
• Change agents and clinical champions – Change agents are essential to successfully implementing predictive analytics, particularly for sustaining its usage. These individuals often work alongside clinicians to map workflows and identify changes and new processes. In addition, clinical champions are a must to promote the tool among their clinical peers.
• C-suite commitment – Frontline buy-in is essential, but without the full commitment of the C-suite, predictive analytics won’t take off or be fully utilized. Identifying measures that resonate with management is important, such as financial penalties associated with hospitals readmissions.

Why Implement Predictive Analytics in Healthcare?

As noted in the HBR article, “Implementing predictive analytics is a means to an end – where the end should represent an improvement in health or health care outcomes, including lower costs.”

Additional major reasons as noted in Hospitals & Health Networks include:

• Success in the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, which may be impossible without the use of predictive analytics, along with data warehousing and integration.
• Being able to understand a healthcare system’s current state is a must for being able to forecast a desired future state and associated plan to get there.
• The ability to get in front of healthcare consumer trends.
• Supporting population health initiatives.
• Improving patient care: reducing hospital readmissions, reducing hospital stays, anticipate staff needs and more.

Ultimately, predictive analytics in healthcare is about translating data and science into practical applications to solve complex clinical and business problems that improve care and control costs. The end game? Strategic, cost-effective high-value care.