It’s not a stretch to say the more data you generate in your healthcare organization, the less you can trust your dashboards and reports—unless you have the right tools in place.
Here’s why.
Let’s say the pediatric, oncology, and orthopedic units in your hospital aren’t using the same definition for an “occupied bed”. One counts patients who’ve been in their rooms for at least eight hours, another counts patients who were in a room at midnight, even if it was only for a couple of hours. When their numbers are compiled into a combined report, the insights will be flawed.
Multiply that by hundreds of reports and dozens of metrics, and you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.
That’s why data experts are focusing more and more on the task of metric consolidation.
Metric alignment is critical.
Gartner recently highlighted an emerging new technology that addresses this issue, called a metric store, also known as a metric hub.
According to Gartner, “Metric stores enable automation and governance on business metrics from different sources”.
These centralized hubs hold standardized definitions for every metric—and then feed those definitions to every report, dashboard, and analytic or AI tool that leverages that metric.
It’s a collaborative tool.
A metric hub is a technical solution, but the process of setting it up goes far beyond a technical exercise. Quite the contrary. It requires conversations, consensus, and regular compromise between various parts of the organization about how various metrics are defined.
Essentially, setting up a metric hub is how an organization establishes metric governance.
Becky Kohler, an expert in informatics and analytics, helped launch a metric hub at her Minneapolis-based organization, Hennepin Healthcare. She says the process continues to be valuable.
“Setting up the Metric Hub forces us to have conversations,” she says, “like, ‘When you say X, are you talking about this? Or this? How do you actually define that thing?’”
Where to start
If you’re looking for a metric store, be sure to find one that’s been tested and proven in healthcare settings.
Regina Duval says the Compendium Healthcare Metric Hub has worked well at CentraCare, a large hospital system where she helps lead analytics.
“Before Compendium, we actually started tracking metrics on a giant, ugly spreadsheet with about a million tabs. We had terms broken out by subject area, and a subcommittee of us were taking a tab at a time,” she says. “We were so excited to take that really ugly spreadsheet and move our metrics into Compendium. Now we use the Compendium Metric Hub as our source of truth.”
Compendium includes a free metric store with their data catalog subscription, as well as free support with implementing and maintaining it.
“I’m excited to see that Gartner’s starting to acknowledge something we’ve been working with for years,” says Kevin Campbell, CEO and co-founder of Compendium. “Any healthcare organization that wants clear insights about what’s happening inside its doors needs good metric governance, and that’s why we built our Metric Hub over 10 years ago. I’m not surprised to see this solution spreading, I’m only surprised it took so long!”
If you’re actively generating data at your healthcare organization (and who isn’t?), you’ll want to implement a metric store sooner than later. The longer you wait, the more metric chaos you may need to clean up.
Automate your metrics with Compendium.
Compendium’s Metric Hub makes it easy to organize and define your organization’s metrics in one central location—and it’s built for healthcare data. Learn more today.
