Outpatient Care Essay

449 Words2 Pages

Outpatient care centers can use data analytics and reporting to measure internal quality, forecast utilization and scheduling, create benchmarks and measure performance to goal. Health care organizations have ever-changing reporting requirements for both private and non-private entities. You cannot have transparency without having reliable, standardized, readily available data. If an HCO has established a plan for data integrity, implemented standards, benchmarks, and data governance, reporting can be performed to meet a variety of forecasting, quality measures, and payer (federal and private) requirements.
If an HCO is just getting started with electronic healthcare records or hasn’t yet evaluated and standardized their data systems there …show more content…

There’s no requirement except that the data be accessible and standardized; it doesn’t need to be complex to get started. HRSA states that the measurement of performance can help reach the common goal of providing high-quality health care. They go on to state that “it allows for an analysis of where and what changes need to be made in order to improve performance and the quality of care provided.” It allows HCOs to measure their success and failures and to learn from their mistakes and establish benchmarks. Not only can it benefit the HCO, it allows for collaboration with other specialty care groups to identify methods with better outcomes. On a larger-scale, collaboration and data sharing can lead to establishing patterns and pinpointing needs in whole communities or nations. There are health care data reporting systems at Dartmouth Atlas that use Medicare data from around the country to show trends in services performed throughout the US that help analysts understand how to better serve the entire US. As shown in the Figure 1 below, the southeast quadrant of the US population is admitted for ambulatory care far more than the northwest. Analysts can study these trends and come to understand this variance. This information would not be available if we didn’t have data to analyze and