Patient census reporting module for improved care

Our client, a leading provider of integrated, value-based healthcare services with over 40 healthcare facilities across the U.S., is committed to transforming care delivery and making it more affordable. Operating under risk-based contracts, the healthcare provider needed a reliable solution for tracking admitted and recently discharged patients to reduce readmission rates, lower financial expenses, and improve the quality of care.

Although healthcare information exchange enables electronic sharing and tracking of patient data across healthcare facilities, its lack of reliability often results in system failures, undermining the quality of care delivery.

The client was experiencing numerous issues, including:

• Data errors caused by hospitals failing to submit accurate and timely information about patients and episodes of care, from admission to discharge.
• Inaccurate, irrelevant, incomplete, and duplicate data.
• Inability to track anomalies in data records, hindering timely identification and resolution.

To provide more value to patients, the client sought robust patient census reporting capabilities. EffectiveSoft was already working on a data warehouse combined with an analytical and reporting tool for the client. As a part of the solution, we were asked to solve this challenge as well.

Within the data warehouse solution, we created a patient census report module containing all information about admitted and recently discharged patients.

Our approach included:

• gathering all episodes of care using rule-based mapping
• cleansing, standardizing, and grouping the gathered data
• linking the data to patients
• creating the patient census report

The report covers complete patient data, including personal information, health history, admissions, readmissions, and discharge. The client’s team uses this data to track patient flow and improve the quality of care.

Leveraging the reporting capabilities, the healthcare provider can:

• Remind a patient to visit a clinic for a follow-up within seven or 14 days after discharge, reducing readmission rates.
• Identify patients requiring extra care and create high-risk patient lists.
• Reduce potential gaps in care, ensuring continuity.
• Lower unnecessary care costs by managing patients during and directly after hospitalization, decreasing hospital-acquired complications and costly readmissions.
• Improve Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) quality metrics that influence contract terms between providers and insurance companies.

In addition to its primary functions, the patient census report offers the following useful capabilities:

Visualizing and filtering data

Data can be visualized in the report, presenting complete patient information in an accessible format, with options to filter and sort patients and care episodes as needed. This enables the extraction of actionable insights from data, facilitating data-driven analysis that supports patient-centered decision-making and enhances patient census management.

Highlighting errors

When a clinic submits incomplete or incorrect data about events or patients, the report highlights entries containing errors, allowing for timely resolution.

Creating events manually

To fill data gaps and ensure accuracy, missing events can be created and data entries can be edited manually.

We developed a relevant and reliable reporting module on episodes of care and patients, enabling the client to improve value-based healthcare delivery. The report is delivered in an intuitive and easily accessible format, allowing the healthcare provider to effectively track patient census, maintain up-to-date information, and leverage it for analytics and decision-making.