Practice Management

I am wondering if for those of you who have performance metrics with your hospital if you would be willing ti share some examples of those metrics

Our institution  want to have all routine exams read in less than 4 hours 90% of the time. (Not on average).  We cover 24/7 and they are saying this includes after hour reading.

They said they did extensive research and this is a standard in the industry.

Any information and feedback is appreciated

Brenda Esopi, BSN MBA

Chief Operating Officer

Brenda.esopi@lancrad.com

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Brandi,

In addition to (wisely) asking for what others are being asked to meet, you should also analyze where you stand today concerning this metric. 

The details of how the hospital calculates this metric is critical.  In my experience the hospital staff preparing this analysis often do a poor job of scrubbing the underlying data (eliminating the non-sensical data points) when performing their analyses.  They just run a report and report the results.  Like any data query, you'll always get an answer.  However, you also need to validate the data being used to perform the calculation, which is where hospital IT and even rad department directly often fall short.  They just are not incented to spend the time to ensure the data is clean or eliminate certain types of studies that should not enter into the calculation. 

For example, how are they going to determine what is a "routine" study?  Will it only apply to studies marked Routine in the EMR?  There are a lot of different categories for order entry staff to choose.  You need to know, but more importantly you need to agree how these will be determined and eliminate data points that shouldn't be included.  In my experience (one anecdote), well over 90% of our hospital's inpt and ER studies are marked stat.  Few are marked routine.  A fair number of opt studies are also marked something other than routine.  Screening Mammograms may be problematic, depending upon how you read them.  If you batch read them you may want to have screening mammography removed from the calc, particularly if you don't read them on weekends. 

You might be able to use your billing data if it is capturing Exam Complete (when the TC was completed) and Exam Final (when the rad signed the report).  However, even if you can, I'd still encourage you to seek access to the hospital's EMR so you can run your own queries to validate the data using the same system they would be using.  It helps to be able to review the same data they would be using to measure your performance.  It also provides you with an opportunity to identify dataset issues and work with them to remove the non-sensical datapoints and some data group prior formalizing the metric.  We have had access to their query system for years and have found it very beneficial in more ways than one.  Usually, we are able to provide meaningful information to them because we understand the data elements better than the people typically charged with designing and running these kinds of reports within the hospital. 

If you are 24/7, and the analysis is done correctly, I'm not sure 90% within 4 hours would be difficult. However, you must know where you stand today before going any further.  You may find you're already meeting it, and doing so with ease (particularly if the data is cleaned).  If you're not, you need to know where you are.  Perhaps the hospital would agree to a different threshold.  You could also try to add something along the lines of meeting XX% within 4 hours, 90% of the time (counted by days). 

Mike Bohl

I am wondering if for those of you who have performance metrics with your hospital if you would be willing ti share some examples of those metrics

Our institution  want to have all routine exams read in less than 4 hours 90% of the time. (Not on average).  We cover 24/7 and they are saying this includes after hour reading.

They said they did extensive research and this is a standard in the industry.

Any information and feedback is appreciated

Brenda Esopi, BSN MBA

Chief Operating Officer

Brenda.esopi@lancrad.com

The information included in this electronic mail may contain confidential or privileged information and is intended for the addressee only.  Any unauthorized disclosure, reproduction, distribution, or action in reliance on the contents of the information is prohibited.  If you believe that you have received this email in error, please notify the sender and delete the message without copy or disclosure.  Thank you.