In this Clinical Dashboard interview, Skilled Nursing News talks with James Yersh, the Chief Financial Officer for PointClickCare. Yersh has over two decades of experience in finance and administration. In his role at PointClickCare, Yersh strives to increase growth and accountability at the company. For his Clinical Dashboard wishes, Yersh wants predictive tools, a prioritization of patients that require the most amount of care, and better resource allocation.
Skilled Nursing News: What are the three most important data points that you would want to see each day on your ideal clinical dashboard and why?
Like most professionals with a finance background, I have a true love of numbers. That said, the clinical dashboard is an extremely crucial part of the day for those individuals caring for patients, but valuable data goes beyond just data points – it’s the insights that really matter.
The first area that comes to mind is the ability to see where a patient has been beyond the four walls in which they are currently receiving care. In order to provide the best possible care, providers require a comprehensive view of a patient’s medical history, including diagnoses, medications and more. Having connectivity to hospital systems or other healthcare networks, clinicians can do their job more effectively. Without this data, important aspects of a patient’s health journey could be overlooked.
The second area is being able to prioritize those patients that need your immediate attention. Dashboard reports that can offer a predictive risk score based on vitals, medication management, fall risk, etc., are essential to help direct the care where it’s needed most. Prioritizing and addressing the needs of these patients can help you avoid admissions and readmissions.
The last set of data points that should be top of mind are the utilization and resource allocation metrics across all facilities within the region. These aid in identifying patterns or trends in service usage that may indicate broader issues within the patient population or the effectiveness of current care strategies.
How would the ideal clinical dashboard drive patient care decisions?
As I mentioned, the priority really is those patients who are at the highest care need. The ideal dashboard makes pertinent information easy to access and understand, surfacing for care teams insights like who needs what action, at what time. By accessing real-time patient insights, caregivers can make necessary health interventions at the right time to not only avoid negative health events (such as rehospitalization), but more importantly, improve care outcomes.
Some other ways that the clinical dashboard can better drive patient care decisions is enabling providers to optimize their resource allocation by leveraging a few utilization insights. For example, bed management and emergency department (ED) flow – by providing real-time data on ED capacity and inpatient bed availability, the dashboard can help manage ED diversions more effectively, ensuring that patients receive timely care. The last area I’ll mention here is around staff optimization and shift planning. This not only helps with state measures, but also helps to ensure you’ve got the best possible clinical care available for patients.
How would the ideal clinical dashboard help optimize reimbursement?
Care team members need to ensure accurate and complete coding to receive full credit for the care being provided. The clinical dashboard will help drive the right care and appropriate reimbursement that will allow them to immediately understand reimbursement impact of any resident diagnosis as they are signed off by the practitioner during the certification process.
The right technology can ultimately help optimize reimbursement by driving greater accuracy and efficiency to this process. Tools like PointClickCare’s PDPM Coach provides guidance to MDS coordinators, allowing them to focus on precise diagnosis code selection and understand the impact of their decisions on reimbursement. Accurate data ensures providers receive fair compensation for the care they deliver.
How can the clinical dashboard improve staffing efficiency?
Staffing issues impact so many aspects of care, and there are several areas in which the clinical dashboard can improve inefficiencies across the ecosystem. For example, the clinical dashboard can ease administrative burden and workload to improve workflow and support staff responsible for critical MDS submissions. It can also quickly move clinical data to revenue with an accurate, real-time reimbursement tool.
How would you like to see the clinical dashboard integrated with predictive analytics tools?
Predictive return to hospital is so important. So many things can arise overnight, so the concept of focusing on the patient who is in the most need for care is extremely important and can be improved with predictive analytics tools. If I’m a clinician, what I care most about is tending to the patients that need care most critically – and predictive tools use real-time data and insights to track changes in patient condition and anticipate health interventions that might be needed.
Oher areas that come to mind are around resource planning. So, this includes things like forecast trends in disease prevalence, seasonal fluctuations in patient volume and emerging health threats, for example.
Besides yourself, what are the most important roles in your organization to also have access to the clinical dashboard?
I think this is a really important question because a view into the clinical dashboard has the ability to impact so many different aspects of care. A few roles that come to mind include:
· MDS coordinator
· Medical provider
· Clinical reimbursement manager/specialists – at all levels
· Regional and corporate nurses
· Director of nurses
· Billing administrators
What would you do to improve the collection of patient health data?
First, there certainly needs to be an emphasis put on what needs to come across about medication and the orders for medication on admission. This is an area that’s typically very prone to error and if something goes wrong with medication management, patients will usually end up back in the hospital.
In addition to that, automated clinical document capabilities place essential patient clinical information directly into the provider’s workflow. So, this helps to ensure successful care transitions, higher quality patient data at the point of care, as well as time and cost savings. Through the clinical dashboard, a team will be able to analyze trends in an organization to identify opportunities for clinical and business optimization, including the accurate collection of patient health data.
Can the ideal clinical dashboard help with value-based care?
Absolutely, and the industry must think about the metrics that drive that spend which is high return to hospital costs. If facilities can avoid those high costs by using a predictive analytics tool to triage their day to handle the most acute folks at risk for return, they’re already going to experience huge savings to the healthcare system.
In addition to that, time needs to be spent on the predicted estimated length of stay vs. Quality of stay. Cutting the length of a stay by one day really has the ability to impact costs. When facilities are able to make those small incremental decisions that influence costs in a positive way, then they are able to really articulate value to providers and engage a little more successfully in those value-based arrangements.
Can the clinical dashboard improve care denials from managed care?
Yes, it allows a team to quickly see reimbursement forecasts at the resident, facility or organization from one central location. You can use data of your own quality to negotiate with payers, so this is crucial. Reduction in care denials is another area to think about. Dashboards can help reduce care denials from managed care by ensuring documentation accuracy, adherence to care guidelines, and by providing data to support appeals for denied claims.
