Aria Martin credits DTA with streamlining access to Summit Orthopedics’ data, so she can focus on quality of care instead.
When Aria Martin was hired by Summit Orthopedics to manage quality and performance improvement, it was an adjustment.
In her previous role at a large hospital, she’d had dashboards and answers at her fingertips. But, at Summit, a smaller organization, her team had to pull data from Summit’s 30 clinics and half-dozen key data systems just to track a single metric.
“I was a little surprised to see we were so dependent on SQL queries directly against our TouchWorks and APM scheduling systems,” says Aria.
Getting answers took hours
The struggle was real. Summit had a tremendous amount of data, but no way to make it accessible.
“It took so long for us to try to pull data together from so many different sources,” says Aria. “And then, to make sure that data was actually reliable, we’d have to do a ton of cross-checking and manual reviews.”
“All of our effort was going into just keeping reports going.”
Help was on the way
Fortunately, just as Aria was starting her new role at Summit, so was a new consulting team—DTA Healthcare Solutions. They’d been brought in to solve exactly this challenge.
DTA started asking questions: What kind of information do you need to be able to see? Where is that data currently? Where do you need it to be?
Soon the scope of the challenge was clear. Summit’s billing data was in APM, clinic visit data in TouchWorks, ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) documented in Amkai, and patient-reported outcome measures and post op nursing documentation from the care suites were in Ortech.
And Aria needed access to all of it.
DTA specializes in healthcare systems, so they got right to work piecing together an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that could house all of Summit’s data in one place.
“Getting data was definitely a limiting factor for us in the past. Now we have a better ability to flex and pivot in real time because the data is no longer a restraint.”
“Now the EDW is pulling all those sources together. “
Almost immediately, Aria started seeing a difference.
Instead of spending hours every month compiling a required report for the Joint Commission, DTA set it up to be automatically generated. “Now I really just review it, ask leaders to update if there’s missing documentation, and then it just goes on its way,” says Aria. “It’s so smooth.”
Within the first year, Aria estimates DTA was already saving her team 44 hours every month.
“And that’s a very modest number” says Aria. “That’s only related to the reports we already had going—that doesn’t include any of the ad-hoc requests that come in, or the reports we need to add for other regulatory reasons. That number is going to keep growing as we keep working with DTA.”
“Now all of that time can be shifted into other work, which is very exciting.”
DTA is streamlining processes across the board.
For Summit, investing in a data partner is paying off beyond just the EDW.
“DTA is helping us see other issues,” says Aria. “Like, ‘Wow, we’re pulling data from this source over here—but why aren’t we pulling from the true data source, which is this other system?’ They also found there was a lot of crossover between departments, and redundancy with work that wasn’t needed. DTA is really helping us solve that.”
“Now we can actually focus on improving quality.”
“I have a passion for quality and performance improvement in healthcare settings,” says Aria. “That’s what I’m here to do.”
Now Aria has been able to focus on improving quality of care, and she credits DTA for helping to make that possible.
“I’m so grateful for the DTA team,” says Aria. “They’re always coming to us with options and solutions on how we can get to our goals. I really appreciate that. It helps launch us so much further ahead. You can tell they really care about us and our projects.”
Does your quality team need help with reporting?
The data pros at DTA Healthcare Solutions can help you streamline your healthcare data—so you can uncover valuable insights and improve your bottom line. Let’s connect.
