Are 100 hours too many to spend on required state reports? This healthcare CFO thought so. Now they’ve got it down to minutes.
Like every healthcare organization in Minnesota, Mille Lacs Health System is required to submit a range of reports every February to Minnesota Community Measures (MNCM), an organization that monitors healthcare quality statewide.
In the past the task was laborious.
The quality manager at Mille Lacs would manually hunt down and compile data from each of their clinics and providers on a range of quality measures: Are diabetes screening goals being met? How often are smokers being offered counseling? How many patients are being screened for congestive heart failure? etc.
“It was a huge undertaking, and it was a manual process,” says Amy Ninham, CFO at Mille Lacs, a rural healthcare organization in the center of Minnesota. “Our manager of quality was spending hundreds of hours a year.”
The annual challenge of compiling Minnesota’s required reports was just one of many issues draining time from the data and quality teams at Mille Lacs. They knew they needed to pull their data together into one central location.
“It was a huge undertaking, and it was a manual process.”
It was time to bring in a partner.
Mille Lacs reached out to the data experts at DTA Healthcare Solutions for help, and soon after brought them on as a managed services partner.
“We brought in DTA to build the infrastructure we needed,” says Amy. “We needed one common area for storing all the data from all of our systems.”
DTA began by establishing a data warehouse for Mille Lacs, then they started using it to help Amy and her team streamline their various reports. At the top of the list was to simplify the complicated reporting process for MNCM. With the data now in one central location, DTA was able to simply write scripts to automate the process.
“Now a script runs automatically,” says Amy, “and the information gets sent directly to Minnesota Community Measures via secure file transfer.”
Right off the bat, this improvement alone saved hundreds of hours of work for the quality manager.
Once DTA automated the process, everything changed.
Now Mille Lacs can focus on patient care.
With hundreds of hours freed up, the quality team at Mille Lacs is now able to focus on more than just measuring quality.
“DTA has freed up our quality team—so they can take care of things that are patient-focused,” says Amy. “Like, how are we caring for patients?”
“For example,” she adds, “I just recently learned that our quality team now goes on daily rounds with the Hospitalists to talk to the patients about how their care is, how the room temperature is—you know, things that really matter from a day-to-day basis. They maybe couldn’t have done that before.”
Finding reports is easier than ever
“Our goal at DTA is to enable leaders and clinicians at Mille Lacs to get the information they need, when they need it,” says Kevin Campbell, CEO of DTA. “We work closely with them to build the tools and processes that make that possible.”
One of the things Mille Lacs needed was to be able to find and use their existing reports, instead of rebuilding them over and over. So DTA implemented Compendium, a powerful healthcare data catalog that makes it easy for anyone at Mille Lacs to search for and find any report or data they need.
Amy says it’s become invaluable for their organization.
“We use Compendium daily.”
“We use Compendium daily,” she says. “That’s where we go to essentially look at or run any of our reports. Our leaders and their staff, they’re using it, and the prior-auth crew, they use it multiple times a day.”
What would Mille Lacs Health do without Compendium?
“Well,” says Amy, “the work would be a lot more manual. Compendium has taken a manual process and made it electronic. So it would be 20 more steps than just the three steps it takes to run it in Compendium.”
“We can’t afford to have somebody on staff that could just do report writing—and we couldn’t even find anybody for that.”
The benefits are ongoing.
Amy says having DTA as her managed services partner—essentially, as an extension of her own team—is helping her focus on revenue goals instead of data.
“The team at DTA is always ready to help us at the drop of a hat,” she says. “When we have something going on or something that needs attention right away, they jump in. And, most importantly, they’re experts. We can’t afford to have somebody on staff that could just do report writing—and they do so much more than just report writing. It’s Compendium, it’s a whole data warehouse. They help with whatever we need, when it comes to our data.”
“We have a great relationship with DTA,” says Amy, “and we really benefit from it.”
Are you spending too much time building healthcare reports?
The data pros at DTA Healthcare Solutions can help you streamline your healthcare data and automate your reports—so you can focus on what matters most. Let’s connect.
