Performance Improvement Strategy
Southern Ohio Medical Center (SOMC), a 211-bed hospital, consists of over 40 clinics servicing the rural Ohioan community. The non-for-profit faced challenges in managing performance improvement across its complex organizational structure.
David Richard, Director of Performance Improvement and Clinical Information Systems, and Tiffany LaCoste, Manager of Performance Improvement, joined us for a customer interview to discuss SOMC’s journey to peak operational efficiency, with the help of ClearPoint Strategy.
Watch the full recording here!
Strategy and performance improvement, while related, serve distinct functions: strategy focuses on leveraging organizational strengths and opportunities to gain a competitive market advantage, whereas performance improvement (PI) concentrates on solving specific problems, streamlining processes, and increasing efficiency.
The PI role also includes quality improvement (QI), a systematic, data-driven approach to achieve better outcomes and reach higher standards. As it is a regulatory requirement to have a QI plan in place, quality improvement is integrated throughout all of SOMC – in reporting, accreditation, research, informatics, and more. Questions that Richard and LaCoste often ask are:
- What are the metrics we’re going to monitor that are key clinically and operationally?
- What are the “bumpers” that will trigger a formal process improvement project using SOMC methodology?
- How will we evaluate the effectiveness?
Before ClearPoint
With a team approach involving a massive scope, the management of hundreds of measures in total became increasingly challenging. Decentralized efforts led to poor control over process and quality improvement, so much so that “pockets of greatness,” as Richard coined it, existed throughout the organization and remained unaddressed.
Data management was a real chore.
Too Much Data
Previously, dedicated people were tasked with populating Excel cells with data from across the organization, then surfacing that information across all of the duplicative places it needed to live for various teams. This proved to be extremely time-consuming and was prone to human error, with data flooding in from:
- Leaders evaluating their operational processes
- Payors submitting claims data, each with individual ICD-10 codes
- Press Ganey patient surveys
- In-house collections for registries
Not Enough Time
Before adopting ClearPoint, SOMC relied heavily on spreadsheets, which made proving compliance during regulatory audits difficult. When regulators asked to see the PI plan – and the execution of it – SOMC struggled to demonstrate its impact for:
- Clinical registries
- Regulatory agencies, such as The Joint Commission and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
- Providers, task forces, departments, etc.
- The higher department of health
- QI registries, including NDNQI
The challenge: displaying disparate data to different audiences. This data needed to be organized in such a way that teams could swiftly gain insights and make decisions on improvements to be made.
The solution: ClearPoint Strategy! The platform allows SOMC to duplicate standardized templates, link metrics among multiple teams, create data visualizations, and more, all while automating manual processes and serving as the single source of truth for all data.
It is far superior at a glance with the visualizations that we’re capable of in ClearPoint to demonstrate trends.
Southern Ohio Medical Center in ClearPoint
LaCoste shares a look inside the SOMC ClearPoint account – click to explore! (9:50)
SOMC’s ClearPoint account is well-structured to streamline information-sharing and transparency across all levels of the organization. By leveraging ClearPoint, SOMC has centralized over 400 scorecards and their metrics.
ClearPoint has made this data easily accessible through an HTML link hosted through SOMC’s intranet, allowing anyone from the CEO to frontline nursing staff to access vital information.
At the core of this structure is SOMC’s overall summary dashboard, which provides a high-level view of performance across the organization. This dashboard includes the “Big Five Strategic Values,” consisting of Safety, Quality, Service, Teamwork, and Finance. Each department within SOMC also has its own dashboard linked to these strategic values, ensuring that each area’s performance is tracked. These detailed departmental dashboards also display key performance indicators (KPIs) using graphs and charts that allow for a quick assessment of performance. This setup facilitates timely decision-making and initiation of improvement projects when necessary.
One of the significant improvements ClearPoint brought to SOMC is the ability to manage and share performance improvement projects, hosting both quantitative and qualitative information. These initiatives, referred to as “A Better Way (ABW),” are now easily navigable. Staff can quickly access detailed process maps, fishbone diagrams, and data associated with PI efforts, all within ClearPoint.
Furthermore, all 200+ providers, like physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants, have an individual dashboard containing their specific performance metrics. These dashboards are protected and accessible only within the ClearPoint live system, maintaining data security while providing valuable insights tied to credentialing, privileging, and other incentives. This level of accessibility has encouraged providers to engage with the data meaningfully, significantly increasing data transparency and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
As leaders in PI, we do a lot of data – trending it, tracking it… but to get us to where we need to be, the frontline staff is going to get us there. ClearPoint gives them the ability to see “Oh, we're not doing that great.” “Are we doing something about it?” “If we’re not, let’s start an improvement project to get there.”
Onboarding with ClearPoint
SOMC involved leaders in the onboarding process, allowing them to view the structure of their customized dashboards and measures. Tailored to reflect meaningful metrics for each leader, these serve as a central location to access data and effectively share information with staff. The individual dashboards also prevent information overload by displaying only relevant data to departments.
The PI team has now been cross-trained to share the support load as well, enabling them to accomplish much more with fewer full-time equivalents. Automation features, such as the Data Loader, drastically reduce the time required to populate data throughout the account. The user-friendly system is able to be managed solely by Richard and LaCoste.
It took one person 40 hours a month to populate all that data in all the places it needed to go, and we’ve cut that down to 15-20 minutes. It's made huge efficiencies for our team.
ClearPoint makes the responsibility of putting action plans in place for metrics that have opportunities for growth more manageable. Involving leaders in the implementation process ensured that the new system aligned with unique departmental needs. This collaborative approach fostered buy-in and highlighted the clear improvements (or rather, “Better Ways”).
Scaling with ClearPoint
For an account as large and complex as SOMC's, ClearPoint's customer support proved invaluable. The ClearPoint team excelled in understanding SOMC's organizational structure and language, providing training to make sure the system met the organization's needs.
SOMC’s experience with ClearPoint underscores the importance of having a clear vision, effectively communicating it, and taking your time to get there. Rather than attempting to configure everything simultaneously, SOMC prioritized giving leaders the opportunity to influence the design and function of their dashboards. Reflecting upon the deliberate, phased approach, allowing users to shape the system and investing in implementation resources were key factors in achieving successful adoption. This strategic partnership and thoughtful, paced implementation have positioned SOMC to fully leverage ClearPoint as the organization scales.
ClearPoint Strategy not only simplified our data management, but also aligned our performance improvement efforts across the hospital. The ability to quickly see and act on opportunities for improvement has been a game-changer.
By implementing ClearPoint Strategy, Southern Ohio Medical Center seized the opportunity to reach operational excellence. Recognizing that their previous methods were broken, the transition was not just a direct transfer of data, but truly a comprehensive upgrade that involved the re-evaluation of processes.
With ClearPoint, SOMC transformed their decentralized and inefficient PI efforts into a centralized, efficient system that significantly improved stakeholders’ ability to interpret data, demonstrate performance improvements, and comply with regulations. ClearPoint Strategy is proud to serve as a cornerstone in their journey toward continuous improvement.
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