Beyond Dashboarding: Real Analytics for the Radiology Practice
By Bill Pickart, CEO, Integrated Medical Partners
 With radiology practices increasingly facing the imperative to function as businesses, dashboarding has become a favorite buzzword—but what does it really mean? It is our contention, at Integrated Medical Partners, that dashboarding is a widely misunderstood concept. A practice’s business intelligence is about much more than the visually pleasing reports output by a single information system operating as a silo.
In this issue of RadAnalytics, we look at how two leading practices are positioning themselves to leverage business intelligence, drawing information from multiple disparate systems to support decision making in an uncertain health-care environment. We also look at the ideal architecture for solid analytics, which includes an array of data sources, methodology for ensuring clean data, and data presentation that uses dashboards to support customized targets.
Bill Pickart is CEO of Integrated Medical Partners. He welcomes your comments at bill.pickart@integratedmp.com.
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Building Radiology’s Relevance: Greater Houston Radiology Associates
By Cat Vasko
 As a neuroradiologist, Ray Kirk, MD, president of Greater Houston Radiology Associates (GHRA) in Texas, often considers both the financial and clinical futures of the specialty. “Where radiology is today,” he says, “there is a need to make ourselves more relevant to the patient-care process in the eyes of our customers—hospitals, referring physicians, and patients. If we cannot do that, I think we are seriously at risk. We must reinforce that we are consultants to avoid becoming a commodity.”
Combined with the ongoing imperative to be more productive for less reimbursement, the need to enhance patient care creates a quandary for radiology practices that Kirk believes can be solved through proper use of the data residing in their information systems. “The more our practice learns about itself, the more we realize the potential of using business intelligence,” he says. “It’s getting us valuable data that allow us to assess what we are doing and make decisions more quickly and efficiently, with a higher level of quality.”
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Parsing Health IT for the Radiology Practice
By Cat Vasko
After consulting for the practice for several years, two years ago, Robert Cannistra joined Radiologic Associates PC (Middletown, New York) as its director of IT. Like many in the informatics field, Cannistra says, he was surprised by the unique challenges that health-care providers face when he first began consulting for hospitals and health-care practices. “I was flabbergasted when I walked into one of the first hospitals I consulted for,” he says. “I was amazed at how many vendors they were contracting with to handle just a single piece of the technology puzzle. Informatics in health care is still very proprietary, and we need to break away from that.”
For that reason, Cannistra says, interoperability must be one of a radiology practice’s key considerations when evaluating a potential purchase of new technology. His technology-assessment process takes a multitude of factors into account, however.
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Architecture and Data Integrity Are Critical to Analytics Success
By Cat Vasko
As radiology practices around the country become increasingly reliant on business analytics and intelligence for decision-making support, the time is ripe to begin devoting additional attention to refining the processes by which their measurements are generated, according to Bill Pickart, CEO of Integrated Medical Partners (IMP). “It is imperative that you understand the quality of the underlying data you are getting, and there are degrees,” he says. “If a database is constructed properly, there should be very little additional effort or cost associated with quantifying and qualifying the data for use by practice decision makers.”
Pickart outlines three key considerations for improved database architecture: data sourcing and origin, data integrity in acceptance and handling, and presentation of analytics.
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OCTOBER 11, 2012
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METRICS IN PRACTICE
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INFORMATION BYTES
Health-care Executives Behind on HIEs: Report
According to the nonprofit ECRI Institute, only 54% of health-care executives have formally assessed their organizations’ health information exchange (HIE) and interoperability needs. The report warns that delays in HIE implementation—as well as meaningful-use challenges—could be the result.
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Scenario Planning for the Radiology Practice
Frank Lexa, MD, MBA, identifies six issues that radiology practices will face with the advent of health-care reform and recommends that they engage in scenario planning to prepare themselves for the postreform era.
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How Errors Proliferate in Patient Data
In a presentation at the AHLA Fraud and Compliance Forum, Laura Roberts, director of corporate compliance for Catholic Health East, shared how errors in patient demographics can easily proliferate through a facility’s data, thanks to automation and cloning.
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