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The Data-Driven Path To Better Performance

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By Monica E. Oss, Chief Executive Officer, OPEN MINDS

Most executive teams are focused on how to get the tools they need to facilitate speedy data-driven decision making. The driver is the changing set of consumer and payer performance measures in the field—with value measures driven by access, experience, and cost factors (For an update on the current high-priority performance metrics, check out my closing keynote, Digital Transformation? It’s About The Customer
, at the 2022 OPEN MINDS Technology & Analytics Institute.

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How to navigate this new performance landscape and improve the tools used for management and decision making was the focus of the session, Competing In A Digital World: Technology’s Role In Building The Hybrid Community-Based Service Delivery Platform Of The Future, at The 2022 OPEN MINDS CEO Technology Summit. In the session, Jill Wiedmann-West, Chief Executive Officer for People Incorporated, discussed their Data Enterprise Project and the lessons learned along the way.

People Incorporated is a non-profit organization that serves consumers with mental illness in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul metro area. Founded in 1969, People Incorporated operates more than 60 programs including crisis residences, outpatient clinics, outreach to the homeless, residential treatment locations, case management, and in-home health services.

Starting in 2018, the organization’s executive team began looking for more effective methods to care for consumers who have complex mental health needs and comorbidities. Unfortunately, because their data existed in separate silos, it was difficult to get an organization-wide picture of what services were most effective and the true costs of those services. To tackle this situation, People Incorporated’s executive team launched their Data Enterprise Project. The goal of the project was to provide a better understanding of the consumer experience and quality of care across the organization’s services.

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In her presentation, Ms. Wiedmann-West described a few key elements in making enterprise data work. One key issue is addressing data integrity from the start. Before starting the process of designing data output or combining data sets, the team needed to assure that the data they had was accurate, complete, and of reasonable quality. Ms. Wiedmann-West observed, “Data integrity basically was not an issue pre-2018”, she said. “I figured everything was working just fine. Our audits looked good. But when we started looking at the data under the filter of analytics, we realized it wasn’t good enough.”

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After addressing the data integrity issue, she outlined some of the key implementation issues and insights. One challenge was integrating clinical work and data, and trying to convey to the community and staff that they aren’t mutually exclusive—they inform one another. For Ms. Wiedmann-West, the key to data integration success is an organized process. “The first thing that we did when we put this together was figuring out who was on the internal team.” she said. “Then we mapped every single data system that we had to every single place in our organization owned by us or tangential to us where we were putting data. That data was either about clients, payers, or revenue. And we mapped all of those together.”

In her closing remarks, Ms. Wiedmann-West spoke to their planned future initiatives based on a more open-ended approach that shifts from data interpretation to data exploration, from model building to data engineering. Doing so will provide a 360-degree consumer view, automate processes and workflows, deliver revenue cycle and cost insights, and improve outcomes. “We are putting our data pipelines together and will be moving forward to see how it’s all fitting together,” she said. “And looking at not just the engineering piece, but the model piece. How we’re going to build that and be able to move data out of that system we hope will be life changing.”

Data integrity and data integration may not seem like exciting initiatives—but they are the foundation for metrics-based management. Provider organization executive teams need to connect the dots between having actionable data and the ability to compete in an increasingly hybrid-model environment. It’s not enough to have multiple lines of service—you need the data to make those services effective and profitable.