CUSTOMER: Amcare Women’s and Children’s Hospital Group
CHALLENGES: Support unified management and decision-making practices across Amcare’s entire organization with comprehensive data sets in real time. Additionally, to exploit analytics dashboards and reports in its rapidly growing system of hospitals to build an efficient, reliable data system for improved operations.
OUTCOME: Amcare leveraged the embedded analytics of the InterSystems data platform, together with a holistic view of administrative and clinical data to create real-time, actionable insights for the organization’s management team.
Founded in 2006, Beijing Amcare Women’s and Children’s Hospital has established itself as a privately owned, premium healthcare organization providing high quality services in seven major areas, including gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics. The organization believes that digital transformation is the best approach to continuous improvement and growth as a top international brand offering healthcare services for women and children. To reach its goal, Amcare has spent the past several years investing in and exploring the integration of healthcare with information technologies.
Healthcare organizations like Amcare must do more than simply store data – rather, they must use it to improve the quality of patient care, reduce readmissions, increase operational efficiencies, and reduce costs. With new and more sophisticated data, they can develop the deeper insights that are critical to improving hospital operations. To meet this imperative, Amcare has embraced InterSystems data platform as their foundation for real-time, aggregated, normalized, and “clean” data. This has enabled it to establish an efficient, reliable IT system, thus providing support for better decision-making and hospital management.
Data to Drive Actionable Insights a Key Component in Digital Transformation
Because Amcare’s success and its future growth depend on the use of clean data, it maintains a corporate culture that shines a spotlight on data-driven decision-making. For example, hospital management teams hold monthly data analysis meetings, during which operational and quality-control data is analyzed in multiple dimensions. These meetings deliver fuller insights into the operations and quality of healthcare in all the affiliated hospitals in the Amcare network.
But it did not used to be like this. Before the data analytics system went live, business units at all levels spent a great deal of time and effort reviewing data and calculating statistics. Different hospitals had different definitions and standards for data statistics, making management and decision making challenging.
To this end, a standardization movement was carried out across the business units at Amcare, unifying the definitions of data, sources, statistical cycles, and verification processes. What’s more, Amcare deployed the InterSystems TrakCare® unified healthcare information system, built on InterSystems IRIS for Health™ data platform, to provide a holistic, granular view of clinical, administrative, and financial information at any given time. This lets Amcare consolidate data and analyze it based on a variety of variables, such as cash income and annual income.
“At Amcare, we are always actively combining new technologies and new ideas in our IT practices,” said Jinjun Cao, Amcare’s CIO.
Amcare subsequently developed a business intelligence (BI) system that builds on the InterSystems functionality. It also created a “mobile cockpit” app, which leverages the data platform to deliver real-time data analytics. This gives corporate and hospital leaders immediate, continuous visibility into operations and enables them to directly intervene in business processes such as wait times, hospitalizations, consolidated annual hospital indexes, and total cash income. The managers can then make more informed, data-driven decisions anywhere, at any time, thus accelerating Amcare’s transition to digital.
With the InterSystems data platform, Amcare conducts data analysis in a more intuitive, comprehensive, and multidimensional way and extends BI to decision-making. Having a unified set of data helps maximize value so that leaders can make better choices across the entire organization and thus improve operations and the organization to provide better services — a natural evolution of health IT, says Cao.
As with collecting and storing data, analyzing and handling data securely and efficiently is critical. Data, after all, is the engine that drives the sustainability of a hospital, whether public or private. As Cao states, “With the InterSystems data platform, we have gained the ability to develop rapidly and flexibly in business innovations. It delivers ultrahigh performance and supports both real-time transaction processing and online analysis, which Amcare needs to gain actionable insights and eventually realize digital transformation. In fact, it is now a must-have in Amcare’s digital strategy for digital care, digital clinics, digital security, digital management, and digital business innovation.”
