We help healthcare systems improve patient care cost-effectively by integrating technology and clinical improvement methodologies.

Healthcare Technology

Delivering a practical data warehouse solution

The HQC Adaptive Data Warehouse™ allows clients to conduct analytics that draw on data from across the range of different source systems that exist in today's healthcare systems. Hospitals often need to answer a clinical improvement question with information spread across the organization: Epic/Clarity data on encounters, orders, and hospital revenue along with patient satisfaction data from Press Ganey, lab and prescription data, etc. With our enterprise data warehouse as a foundation, it is easy to get real answers and get them more quickly and reliably than with any other enterprise data warehouse solution available.

With our Adaptive Data Warehouse™ as a foundation, we also provide clients with specific subject area data marts that combine related clinical data (already within the enterprise data warehouse) into a consolidated analytic repository. These subject area data marts have been developed with significant clinical guidance and contain both process and outcome metrics for clinical program or clinical support service domains. The pregnancy subject area data mart within the Women and Newborns clinical program, for example, allows the team to understand how to make continuous, evidence-based improvements in care delivery.

Because we've already developed the robust software that works with clients' existing software for data sources and visualization, our clients can be up-and-running with their own enterprise data warehouse in less than four months, a feat that no other data warehouse solution can match. Our clients can then have functioning source marts and subject area data marts for particular clinical programs within a few more months.

Clinical Improvement

Providing proven continuous quality improvement methodologies

Quality improvement should be driven by clinical leaders, not the technical team. This is true in all industries, but particularly in healthcare. Quality improvement requires interdisciplinary teams of people with clinical, technical and process improvement backgrounds working together effectively. Building on years of experience in clinical integration and quality improvement in healthcare, we offer clients proven clinical improvement methodologies. Our organizational structure templates, role definitions and process templates can help organize healthcare and technical professionals into teams that are well positioned to identify, measure, and refine improvement initiatives.

Our Clinical and Organizational Leadership Team (COLT) structure and key process analysis brings together a healthcare system's leaders to prioritize quality improvement efforts. By focusing first on the greatest opportunities (considering limited time and resources), the COLT can prioritize strategically and avoid reactionary or “management by crisis” tendencies so common in healthcare systems today.

Care Process Model (CPM) Work Groups and Clinical Program Guidance Teams can then be formed for areas identified as priorities by the COLT. Physician and nurse experts working together on the CPM Work Group and the Clinical Review Team in the cardiovascular clinical program area, for example, first define optimal care processes based on the scientific evidence. They define process metrics, as well as quality and cost outcomes.   The team implements improved care by providing education and support to clinical staff as well as an analytic feedback loop that measures if care is delivered according to that optimal care process they helped design.

HQC's clinical integration products and services include team structures and charters, as well as work plans, roles and responsibilities matrices, and milestone checklists. We also provide training modules and consulting support to get the teams at the leadership and the clinical program levels functioning effectively.

Technology and Clinical Improvement Integration

Improving care by giving clinical improvement teams the information they need

A data warehouse that only IT professionals can access and understand won't improve care. Integrated care process teams, no matter how well structured and trained, can do little to improve care without the right data.

Patient care improves, and waste is reduced when clinicians drive the definition of measurements, getting actionable information which is clinically important. HQC's founders experienced this at Intermountain Healthcare and now help healthcare systems achieve this integration of technology and clinical improvement methodologies.

This integration occurs first at the clinical leadership level. Through the Clinical Leadership and Operations Team (COLT), the physician, nursing, and administrative leaders can accurately prioritize which clinical program areas to focus on when they are armed with the results from our Key Process Analysis Tool™ that draws on our Adaptive Data Warehouse™. These results show which clinical processes have both the highest volume of activity and the most variation in care delivered.

The integration of technology and clinical improvement methodology also occurs at the clinical program level in a Care Process Model (CPM) Work Group. The CPM Work Group brings outcomes analysts and data architects together with physician and nurse experts. With HQC templates as an aid, the physician and nurse experts lead the development of a subject area data mart specific to their clinical program area. That development starts with the definition of an evidence-based scientific thought process encapsulated in a care process model, followed by identification of the key performance indicators and outcome measures critical to managing the clinical process. Information available in the Adaptive Data Warehouse™ helps clinicians gain new knowledge about the process of care delivery and current process failures. This approach encourages learning rather than "ranking and spanking" the "bad" providers. The CPM Work Group also develops education and decision support tools that make it easy for physicians and nurses to "do the right thing" as defined in the evidence-based care process model.