Ember in Healthcare
Ember Metrics is being used to solve a wide variety of challenges faced by healthcare organizations. The platform centralizes the management of all indicators throughout the organization. This allows re-use of data, eliminates inconsistencies, and provides a simple mechanism to adapt to changing processes and reporting requirements. Some of the ways that Ember Metrics is utilized within healthcare is listed below:
Quality Improvement Plans
Primary care organizations, community care access centres, and long-term care homes develop internal quality improvement plans as part of a documented commitment to improving the quality of care for their patients. These institutions submit results to Health Quality Ontario (HQO) every year to allow provincial-wide analysis. Ember Metrics allows you to quickly setup appropriate QIP indicators for your organization from our indicator library.
Unit-Level Quality Boards
Hospitals often decide to focus on unit and program-level performance improvement strategies that allow managers to baseline and improve their own performance. Each unit may focus on several independent measures that they consider key to operational improvement. Ember Metrics allows you to easily manage the hundreds of unit-level indicators needed to successfully implement this type of initiative.
Internal Corporate Performance Reporting
Executives, managers, and board members track indicators on a monthly basis to ensure that key operational metrics are meeting organizational targets. This is often accomplished using a report listing indicators with simple red/yellow/green statuses that highlight areas of concern. Ember Metrics allows you to set targets against indicators using a variety of methods including period-over-period, year-to-date, and year-end forecast status calculations.
Strategic Planning
Healthcare organizations embark upon strategic planning initiatives such as balanced scorecards. These typically involve not only tracking individual operational metrics but also strategic goals, objectives, and outcomes. Ember Metrics utilizes industry-standard normalized scoring algorithms to calculate performance from disparate metrics and also allows qualitative (non-measured) statuses and scores for subjective indicators.
LHIN Reporting
The Ontario Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) corporations have unique data collection requirements. They collect and track a variety of metrics from hospitals, community care access centres, long-term care facilities, mental health services, and community health centres. They must also calculate LHIN totals from the data provided from their constituent healthcare organizations. Ember Metrics allows LHINs to easily manage the hundreds of metrics they need to track throughout their region and automatically calculate LHIN-wide values.
Manually Managed Data
Healthcare facilities often track data that is not managed or stored within corporate IT systems. This data is typically maintained manually in spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization. Ember Metrics provides a central repository for all of these miscellaneous metrics thereby reducing data management overhead and providing a single data source for reporting.
