Transforming Data Noise Into Healthcare Action
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Epic
- Qlik Sense
Tech Stack
- Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
- Data Warehousing
- Data Visualization
- Azure servers
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Quality Assurance
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Remote Patient Monitoring
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Contra Costa is a county with a population of about 1.1 million people in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Contra Costa Health Services is the safety net system for the residents of the county. They are somewhat unique in the United States as they are an integrated health department with multiple divisions under one umbrella: hospital and clinics, health plan, behavioral health, public health, health services in detention centers, environmental health, EMS, and even restaurant inspections. The hospital and clinics serve approximately 125,000 patients a year and the health plan has 180,000 members receiving their insurance coverage through them. In every respect, they are here to help their residents live safely, healthily, and well.
The Challenge
Contra Costa Health Services, a safety net system for the residents of Contra Costa county, was struggling with data management. Despite having access to a large amount of data, the organization was unable to extract actionable insights from it. The data systems were limited and decision making often had to be gut-based due to lack of evidence. The culture around data awareness was also very different at the time. Data can tell uncomfortable stories, and those stories can ruffle some feathers if an organization has not made the data maturity journey. Things changed significantly in 2010 with the Affordable Care Act and its funding for electronic health records (EHRs). As a result, in 2012 they went from only using electronic systems primarily for billing and claims to using Epic, an enterprise wide EHR solution. With a consolidated system and a great platform, they suddenly had access to massive quantities of data. The EHR data in the data warehouse was supplemented by developing partnerships with social services, county jails, and other community organizations to share data while following prevailing privacy laws.
The Solution
In 2016, Contra Costa Health Services partnered with Qlik and within three months, published their first dashboard for the pay for performance Medicaid waiver program that is known in California as PRIME. Qlik Sense is so intuitive that the intended users didn’t need assistance getting started. As long as they followed some simple design principles, all new users needed was a tip sheet and a data dictionary to get them going. After the success of that first dashboard, other departments saw the benefit of having these actionable insights. Now they have more than 25 dashboards targeting specific needs, including one for their Whole Person Care Program. This program strives to treat the whole person, believing that addressing the root causes of health issues leads them to deliver better service at a reduced cost. Their first task as analysts was to draw together the data on the social determinants of health— including information on things like access to food and transportation, along with health data—and develop a risk model to identify the top 12,000 most at-risk individuals from the eligible population and get them enrolled in the program. The next step was to create a dashboard for their 150 Whole Person Care case managers.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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