Keeping Hospital Value Analysis Analytics Simple

Less is more when it comes to telling a story with your healthcare value analysis analytics reports.

I cannot tell you how many meetings I go to and make my key points with just one or two slides for an entire spend category of purchase. My customers get it, their senior management gets it, and their doctors get it as well.  

In this world of highly visual analytic software and reporting capabilities it is very easy to fall into what I call the “Esoteric Trap”. The Esoteric Trap is the mindset that our co-workers, colleagues, and bosses get when they think of the term “analytics”, or in our case, value analysis analytics. They think we have to have this super robust series of charts of all kinds to make our points to our evidence requesting doctors and clinicians. They believe that we need to wow them with these esoteric charts that tell them anything and everything under the sun, when that is just not the case.

When you understand the value analysis analytics world more succinctly it is getting the most out of the least amount of charts in order to make your business case for change. If I show a chart that can tell me where exactly a hospital stands on their cost per davinci robot supplies per case and then follow that slide up with a benchmark chart of where they stand with their peers, right away my client hospital realizes that they are way over the benchmark cohort curve and are doing something majorly different in either managing their costs or managing the procedures that are using the davinci robot. 

The example above is in simplistic terms, a simple example that takes a very esoteric machine, the davinci robot, and isolates the instruments utilized into a simple calculation for the surgical management and doctors to see where they stand. Up until they engaged us, they were not tracking this cost and basically thought of the davinci as a loss leader in many respects because from a marketing standpoint they had to have it. Just because you have to have it and it may incur some losses does not mean that you should totally disregard the cost per procedure on these highly expensive instrument attachments.   

Value analysis analytics is about making the key business points for change use the least amount of reports or slides to support your business case. Less is more with VA analytics.