At analyticsMD, we believe that improving the efficiency of hospitals is a critical piece in solving the cost crisis the U.S. faces in healthcare. Helping hospitals work better through optimized demand planning, predictive staff allocation, and smoothed patient flow – all driven by software – is a mission we are proud to work towards.
Now is the time to be thinking about how we can make our hospitals more efficient. It is clear that our healthcare system is on a trajectory towards increasing utilization and increasing cost. And the cost increases we have seen in recent years form a worrying trend. The first step to improving efficiency is to understand what exactly it means and where we stand now.
For folks who are less familiar with our healthcare system, the notion of hospital efficiency can be a tough concept to pin down. Additionally, while there are large public data sets available to evaluate hospital efficiency, drawing meaningful insights from them is not always a simple task.
With this as a context, we are excited to announce the analyticsMD Hospital Efficiency Benchmarks. These benchmarks form a simple and intuitive view of a handful of important standards of efficiency in hospitals. We’ve analyzed a number of public datasets to produce these benchmarks, making it easy to see how efficiently any hospital in the U.S. operates compared to its peers.
How does your community hospital compare to others in the region? How about the large hospital in the nearby city? How do the benchmarks relate to your own experiences as a patient in these facilities?
Even if you’ve never looked at healthcare data before, we’ve made it easy to answer these questions. We’ve focused on a handful of critical operational areas: the Emergency Department, inpatient satisfaction, and inpatient staffing cost efficiency. You may find interesting relationships within and between these measures. For example, if your local hospital spends more to staff its inpatient departments than its peer hospitals, does that lead to patients who are more satisfied with their care?
We hope that seeing this information will help build understanding and awareness of our healthcare system’s efficiency. Perhaps seeing some of this information will even inform where you decide to go for care in the future. For hospital administrators, we hope these benchmarks provide an objective, outside-in assessment of their facilities’ operational performance.
We’d like to mention that this analysis would not be possible without datasets made available by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). We enthusiastically support the transparency CMS has enabled through these public datasets.
Finally, we would love to hear what you think of this project. Please e-mail us at hospitalefficiency@analyticsmd.com.
Happy exploring!
The analyticsMD team
