The University of Kansas Hospital Selects Health Catalyst's Late-Binding Data Warehouse and Analytics Platform

Data platform to accelerate improvements in clinical quality and operational efficiency

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Jul 17, 2014, 08:11 ET

SALT LAKE CITY and KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The University of Kansas Hospital, a world-class academic medical center and destination for complex care and diagnosis, has selected Health Catalyst, a leader in healthcare data warehousing and analytics, to further improve the quality of care and lower costs.

The University of Kansas Hospital is a 707-bed general medical and surgical facility consistently ranked among top hospitals by The University HealthSystem Consortium's Quality and Accountability Study. It has also been nationally ranked since 2007 among U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals, with 12 specialties in the national Top 50 for 2014-15. The same publication has named it the best hospital in Kansas City for five consecutive years and the best hospital in Kansas for the past three years.

Health Catalyst's Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse and Analytics Platform will give leaders and clinicians at The University of Kansas Hospital a unified view of the terabytes of clinical, financial and patient satisfaction data collected across the hospital and its specialty clinics where its 700 staff physicians practice. The hospital will form multi-disciplinary teams of physicians, nurses, IT experts, administrators and finance experts to use the platform to reduce variation in clinical care processes and add efficiency to key administrative functions like financial management.

"The University of Kansas Hospital has invested long-term in building a world-class data infrastructure, but like other hospitals we've found that combining and analyzing the data from multiple IT systems to guide process improvements is quite challenging," said Chris Hansen, chief information officer of The University of Kansas Hospital. "We look forward to working with them to use our data to better serve our patients and physicians."

Unlike traditional "early-binding" EDWs, which typically require up to 18 months to start delivering value, the Health Catalyst platform provides fast time-to-value and "often gives clients some tangible results in three to four months," according to a report by the respected healthcare research firm, KLAS (Healthcare Analytics: Making Sense of the Puzzle Pieces, January 2014).

For its staff physicians, The University of Kansas Hospital will make data from Health Catalyst available via dashboards designed to help them manage their patient populations. For example, the plan calls for clinicians to review compliance with evidence-based guidelines for preventive medicine, for individual patients as well as their entire patient population.

"Physicians as a rule always want to have more information about their patients and we are turning to this technology to democratize the use of data and analytics to further improve care across the hospital," said Chris Harper, Director of Business Intelligence at The University of Kansas Hospital. "We want our physicians to see gaps in recommended care, what interventions have been made, and what treatments are overdue or upcoming – all information that is vital to improving population health management."

Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst, commented, "To thrive in our evolving value-based healthcare system, hospitals need to quickly make sense of and analyze the large volumes of data stored in their disparate systems, identify opportunities for quality improvement and cost savings, and then enable their caregivers to take appropriate action. We are thrilled that The University of Kansas Hospital, one of our nation's top hospitals, has chosen Health Catalyst to help them advance the science and process of quality and performance improvement."

Built for today's needs while adaptable for tomorrow's, Health Catalyst's data warehousing and analytics platform normalizes disparate data sources and enables rich meta data management that facilitates data access, discovery, analysis and reporting. The approach not only is faster and more agile than traditional "early-binding" enterprise data warehouses but also addresses the need for clinical analysis of near-real time information to track and improve care for whole populations of patients.

Health Catalyst deploys with 10 standard content-driven analytics applications and a framework that enables rapid development of hundreds of new applications to solve both basic and complex reporting needs for a healthcare delivery system. As a result, clients are able to implement changes in process and behavior much faster and more broadly, scaling the systematic improvement of clinical quality and operational efficiency.

About The University of Kansas Hospital

The University of Kansas Hospital is the region's premier academic medical center, providing a full range of care. The hospital is affiliated with the University of Kansas Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions, and their various leading-edge research projects. The constantly growing facility contains 683 staffed beds (plus 24 bassinets) and serves more than 30,000 inpatients annually. Twelve of its medical and surgical specialty areas are ranked nationally by the U.S. News & World Report "Best Hospital" lists, including Cancer (#29), Cardiology & Heart Surgery (#21), Diabetes & Endocrinology (#20), Ear, Nose & Throat (#17), Gastroenterology and GI Surgery (#24), Geriatrics (#16), Gynecology (#38), Nephrology (#33), Neurology & Neurosurgery (#12), Orthopedics (#33-Tied), Pulmonology (#12) and Urology (#36). The cancer program is part of The University of Kansas Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute designated program. The hospital has received Magnet nursing designation, reflecting the quality of care throughout the hospital, an honor awarded to only 6.6 percent of the hospitals nationwide. The hospital also houses the region's only accredited burn center, the area's only nationally accredited Level I Trauma Center and the area's only Advanced Comprehensive Stroke Center recognized by The Joint Commission. For more information, visit kumed.com.

About Health Catalyst

Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing and analytics company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes perform the clinical, financial, and operational reporting and analysis needed for population health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in support of more than 30 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Faster and more agile than data warehouses from other industries, the Health Catalyst Late-Binding™ EDW has been heralded by KLAS as a "newer and more effective way to approach EDW." For more information, visit www.healthcatalyst.com, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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