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PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
An Online Physician/Hospital Performance Management System |
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| Our client required a solution that would enable them to provide hospitals and other related agencies with a mechanism to compile and evaluate physician and hospital performances against a set of criteria. The performance metrics/criteria were required to be easily customizable in order to meet hospital specific requirements. Icreon delivered to them a performance management system that enables the data, pertaining to physicians and hospitals, to be analyzed and processed against predefined and customizable performance metrics. A data loader module was developed that enabled the data (provided by various healthcare agencies) stored in an external source to be accessed, processed and stored into the application database. A front-end module was developed enabling hospital staff and physicians to search and browse the results of the performance analysis. |
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| Business
Requirement |
| Our client wanted to provide hospitals with an online mechanism to review and monitor the performances of physicians and hospitals against predefined metrics. The solution was required to collate and analyze the data provided by various healthcare agencies such as hospitals, nursing homes etc. Front-end interfaces were required enabling users to search and view the results of the performance analysis. Performance measures were required to be diagrammatically represented in the form of charts, graphs etc. Provisions to download and print the results were required to be built into the application. |
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| A web enabled solution to monitor physician and hospital performance |
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Icreon developed the solution using the Microsoft .net framework. The solution can be installed on an intranet and can be used by hospitals to analyze physician and hospital data in order to review and monitor the performance. Application configuration settings such as layout, performance metrics, and calculations to be performed etc are stored in an XML file. NAnt, a .net based application build tool has been used to create customized application installers, based on the parameters specified in the XML file, for individual hospitals.
The solution has been divided into two main modules:
DATA LOADER
The data loader is a console based application written using C# and is used to fetch, process and upload the data, stored in an external source such as a text file or a database, into the application database.
For each performance measure (defined and set at the time of configuration) the data (contained within the specified datasets) is analyzed, calculations are performed and the results are stored against relevant measures.
FRONT-END
The web based front-end interface can be used to view the results of the performance analysis. Users i.e. hospital staff and physicians can search and browse physician/hospital profiles in order to review and monitor performances. Profiles can be searched on the basis of the specialty or performance measure. Filters having multiple conditions can be defined and set enabling profiles to be searched on the basis of performance measures. Physicians can be grouped to calculate and review their performances collectively. Tasks or reminders can be created and assigned to specific physicians.
The performance of a hospital, for a specified time period, can be viewed. In addition to the data provided by various hospitals, nursing homes etc, data pertaining to the national benchmarks (set for health care institutions), provided by the relevant government agencies is uploaded into the solution using the data loader (usually done on an annual basis). This data is used to evaluate and judge the performance of a hospital against the benchmarks.
Dundas Charting, a third party data visualization tool has been integrated with the solution in order to render the results of the performance measures as graphs and charts. The results of each measure are displayed in a color coded dial representing the magnitude of a physician's/hospital's performance, thereby enabling easy understanding and assessment of performance.
Physician Measures
The measures for evaluating the performance of physicians can be broadly classified into:
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Patient measures: Includes measures that relate to patient characteristics such as patient age, attending and discharge data etc. |
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Quality Measures:Refers to the quality of care provided by a physician and can include measures such as mortality rate, readmissions, complications, adherence to standards etc. |
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Utilization Measures: Refers to the utilization of hospital resources in providing patient care and can include measures such as length of stay, average charges, average consultants used etc. |
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Hospital Measures
The measures for evaluating the performance of hospital can be broadly classified into:
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Growth measures: Measures the growth of a hospital in terms of number of discharges. |
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Quality Measures: These measures judge the performance of the hospital in terms of the quality of care provided. It includes measures such as mortality rates, complications, readmissions, severity levels etc. |
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Service Measures: Refers to measures such as admission sources (i.e. referrals, emergency room, births etc), age range and gender of patients. |
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Financial Measures: These measures are used to evaluate the financial performance of a hospital. It includes measure such as average patient charges, payer (i.e. insurance companies) summary etc. |
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People Measures: These measures judge the performance of a hospital in terms of its staff i.e. their courtesy, communication skills, respect shown to patients, teamwork etc. | |
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Provisions have been built enabling users to download physician profiles as PDFs. A third party component - ABCpdf - has been integrated with the solution to generate on-the-fly PDF documents.
Through the admin section, authorized personnel can create and manage user profiles, grant/restrict access to specific modules within the application, and can view and download application usage logs.
Automated Test Module
We have integrated the open source testing component - Selenium with the solution in order to provide a browser based test module that automates the process of testing the various performance measures included in the application. Test Cases (in the form of C# .NET 2.0 classes) for each performance measure has been written. The test cases are executed in the module to ensure the proper functioning of the performance measure. When a test case is run, the module requests the web application for the required data. The data is used by the Selenium component to generate the results for the performance measure being tested. The XML log files containing the results of the test are generated.
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| Technologies used
in developing this web application are: |
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| Summary |
| The solution developed by Icreon enables healthcare agencies to create a repository of hospital/ physician profiles and helps them to track and analyze individual physician/hospital performances. Diagrammatic representation of various performance metrics enables quick assessment and identification of problem areas thereby leading to improvements in the performance of the physicians. Effective monitoring enables hospitals to improve performance and control costs. |
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"I would like to commend you for
the excellent service you provided us, getting back to us even
at odd hours of the day and working across different time zones,
to ensure that we met our deadlines on time.…” |
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BP & GLUCOSE TRACKER
Vertical - Healthcare
Platform - Microsoft .net |
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QUALITY
PROCESSES
(Web Page) |
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ENGAGEMENT
MODELS
(Web
Page) |
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CASE
STUDIES
(Web
Page) |
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