Just The Facts Ma’am (Oh, and 5 Favorite facts Quotes)

Posted by Bob Ainsbury

Unless you are a narcissist, and a healthy one for that matter, you must have heard that the costs of healthcare are sky rocketing and providers are struggling to make ends meet. So much so that many of our customers are being challenged to reduce expenses by millions of dollars over the next twelve months alone.

Being in the black, is the new black!

The bad news is that cost pressures are not new, and many organizations have been shaving costs for years and even decades. There are few obvious places where money can be saved. (To the naked eye that is.)  Healthcare is a complicated business. It’s literally organic; people making other people healthier.

Make no mistake though; there are huge opportunities to save money. To do so, you just need the facts. You need to pull information from across the enterprise, correlate the data and then analyze it. That’s all. Thankfully there’s a technology for that ….

Shameless plug: Lawson Analytics for Healthcare is specifically engineered to let healthcare providers analyze their operations and reduce costs. There is, for example, a module focused on labor analytics, and another on supply chain efficiency. Evidence. Analysis. Savings. Questions?

Good healthcare is evidence-based, but that doesn’t just apply to caring for a patient, it applies to the health of the institution offering that care. So there you go. If you aren’t using advanced analytics you are wasting money. Period.

And now here are a few of my favorite facts quotes:

1. “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.” Dr. Laurence J. Peter
2. “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of the facts and evidence.” John Adams
3. “Facts are ventriloquists’ dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.” Aldous Huxley
4. “Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.”  Galileo Galilei
5. “I’m not a fan of facts. You see, facts can change, but my opinion will never change, no matter what the facts are.” Stephen Colbert

Got any favorite fact quotes? Do share….

Sisters of Mercy Supply Chain Restocks Joplin Hospital Within 12 Hours

On Sunday, May 22, 2011 St. John’s Regional Medical Center was in the direct path of the EF5 tornado and was one of 300-plus businesses shut down by the 200-mile per hour winds in Joplin, MO. Part of Sisters of Mercy, St. John’s was the largest employer to be shut down by the storm.

The dedicated physicians, nurses and associates needed an emergency room to care for storm victims -  and amazingly, they were up and running that evening by setting up a temporary hospital in Joplin’s Memorial Hall. Lawson is proud to call Sisters of Mercy a supply chain customer, especially after the following update on Twitter:

You can donate online to help those devastated in the May 2011 tornado in Joplin, MO.

How do you face unexpected challenges?

Lars Lawson is back! And this time he’s “On Safari”.

Who is Lars? He is the face of Lawson and a hit on YouTube.   

In his latest adventure our customer is faced with unexpected challenges and needs a solution, fast! Sound familiar? While the solutions of others are sometimes over-engineered and create bigger problems than they solve, Lars comes up with a tried and true solution that yields additional benefits.

Lars’s solution to the problem is no myth, but an undeniable fact proven by the Mythbusters themselves!

See for yourself! Watch Lar’s in action.

View more of Lars’ adventures.

Do You Want to be a Strategist? You should!

Posted by Bob Ainsbury

Being responsible for an organization’s strategy is, without doubt, a fantastic job! It might not be as good as being an over paid food and wine critic, but it’s sure close.

So what makes a good strategist?

People with deep analytical roots are attracted to strategy roles, but they rarely succeed.  All too often strategies fail because they are founded primarily in analysis; they are intellectual to a fault. Analysis is very important, no doubt, but the best strategies IMHO are the ones that combine a deep understanding of the market place with a deep understanding of the organization. Every impactful strategy has to be executed, and therein lies the rub.  

The great strategists in modern business have several import attributes:

• His/her three most important organs are (in order) the ears, the brain and the mouth
• He/she can engage in full contact dialog with analysts, suits, janitors, and teenagers, as well as surgeons/engineers/designers (whoever is you organization’s “essence” role)
• They follow fashion, current events and are global
• They know what can be accomplished, how and by whom

Paradoxically the most effective strategists (I have encountered) are highly independent thinkers, and yet deeply connected to the thoughts of others inside and outside the organization.

Still want to be a strategist? I hope so.

Let us know if you would like to learn more about strategy and, in particular, about Lawson’s healthcare strategy.  Meanwhile I am off to a critique a new Twin Cities restaurant.

How do you leverage HIE for true EHR Interoperability?

Good question! North Texas Speciality Physicians and Jerry Rankin, director of industry strategy, Lawson Healthcare, are partnering to answer that question during the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo on Wednesday, June 8 at 12:15 p.m. CT. 

Jerry Rankin and Thomas M. Deas, MD, board member and founding member, North Texas Specialty Physicians, will present the session titled “Large Physician Group Leverages HIE for True EHR Interoperability.”  They will demonstrate how to meet meaningful use criteria through an HIE deployment that improves care coordination and quality management by providing clinical decision support, quality measures and EHR interoperability.

“Attendees will see and appreciate the profound clinical value and impact of the health information exchange and the value of decision-support tools that have been created to assist care delivery at the point of care and for managing patients with chronic and complex medical conditions,” explained Dr. Deas, a clinical gastroenterologist in private practice who has worked with North Texas Specialty Physicians to develop the health information exchange.

Sign up or learn more about the HIMSS Virtual Conference & Expo here.

Lawson Analytics for Healthcare is Making News

On April 4, 2011 Lawson announced at CUE11 Lawson Analytics for Healthcare, a new analytic solution purpose-built for healthcare to identify and drive out costs without adversely impacting patient outcomes. There has been tremendous response from customers, media and analysts.

Dean Hager Presents Lawson Analytics for Healthcare at CUE11

InformationWeek and SearchHealthIT both have highlighted the progress at Catholic Health East use of analytics to improve efficiency and manage key vendor performance.  Analysts at ARCView also had interesting things to say about Lawson’s new solution and overall annual customer exchange perspectives.

What do you think of the Lawson Analytics for Healthcare? Leave a comment. Not familiar with the solution, visit www.lawson.com/healthcare/analytics.

How to tackle nurse staffing nightmares

The U.S. Department of Labor reports job openings in the nursing field will grow by 22 percent nationally in less than 10 years.

Robin Stimac, industry strategy director, human capital management, Lawson Healthcare, is featured in the March 2011 issue of Health Management Technology (HMT). Robin dives into the ‘why’ behind the shortage, shares how Samaritan Health Services is tackling its staffing issues and saving millions of dollars and shares her insight on the best way to truly combat the nursing shortage.

Read the article here: An end in sight for nurse staffing nightmares.  Once on the site, click on the bookmark, or advance to page 18. After you read the article – let us know how you tackle staffing challenges by leaving a comment below.

If you want to learn more about Lawson’s solutions for staffing, click here.

Introducing Lawson Analytics for Healthcare

Lawson Healthcare is excited to introduce yet one more way to make our customers stronger – Lawson Analytics for Healthcare. This new suite of analytic solutions offers healthcare organizations a simple way to connect staffing, clinical and financial information for better decision making. Lawson Analytics for Healthcare is designed to help deliver the benefits of a major business intelligence project at a fraction of the cost and time. It is scheduled to be generally available in May 2011 and will provide timely metrics from across the organization to help healthcare organizations measure, improve and monitor their financial performance.

Built by healthcare experts for healthcare organizations, Lawson Analytics for Healthcare helps simplify access to the right information at the right time across an organization. It extracts data from Lawson applications, including supply chain, staffing and financial data, as well as data from non-Lawson systems. This creates a rapid connection within a healthcare organization’s operations allowing staff to stop searching for data and start analyzing it. It also provides greater confidence in business decisions. 

• Read Marianne Kolbasuk McGee’s article in InformationWeek to see how Catholic Health East is already benefiting from Lawson Analytics for Healthcare.
• Read Bob Ainsbury’s, Lawson’s vice president of healthcare strategy, take on how Lawson Analytics for Healthcare will play a major role in ACOs in Healthcare IT News. 
• Learn more about Lawson Analytics for Healthcare

 

For more information on healthcare solutions, visit Lawson Healthcare online.

Using GS1 to Achieve the Perfect Order

Although the concept of the Perfect Order is not new, in the healthcare supply chain, only in the past few years have providers and suppliers begun tracking Perfect Order metrics as key measures of supply chain performance.  Thanks in no small part to Strategic Marketplace Initiative’s championing of the concept, Perfect Order has taken off, with numerous providers adopting Perfect Order metrics as their supplier performance standard.  

Two of the early adopters were Sisters of Mercy Health System and Becton Dickinson.  At AHRMM in 2009, I recall how the two organizations shared on how they were using these metrics to help track progress in driving improved efficiency.  In that presentation, GS1 standards were highlighted as a crucial tool for reducing the number of errors within the supply chain.

Fast forward to March 2011… 

Sister of Mercy Health System announces that they are the first healthcare provider in the U.S. to implement end-to-end GS1® Standards to achieve “perfect order.”  I congratulate them on being the first Lawson customer to take full advantage of our purpose-built, industry leading GS1 functionality in Lawson S3 9.0.1 to exchange both Global Location Numbers (GLNs) and Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) with their trading partners.  By leveraging GS1 standards, supply chain exceptions should continue to go down, reducing costs for all parties.

Although Sisters of Mercy is the first to use both GLN and GTIN, many other Lawson customers are also using Lawson to exchange GLNs with their suppliers.  If you’re attending CUE, I invite you to attend the GS1 Panel session to hear two new case studies on the use of GS1 in healthcare.  

Excerpts from the Sisters of Mercy news release:

Sisters of Mercy Health System (Mercy) is First in Nation to Implement End-to-End GS1® Standards to Achieve “Perfect Order”

Provider is poised to achieve true perfect order through full automation

ST. LOUIS (March 18, 2011) – ROi, the supply chain division of Mercy Health System, has completed end-to-end, from purchase order to point of consumption, integration of GS1® Standards* with its supply chain information systems to enable the achievement of “perfect order.”

Perfect Order, a standard prevalent in many industries, including retail, is defined by Strategic Marketplace Initiative (SMI) as “a purchase order processed electronically (from order to payment) without human intervention, delivered to the correct location, on time, undamaged, at the right price, with the desired quantity, on the first attempt.” This process ensures effective use of available resources by eliminating errors and maximizing the use of technology.

 ”We have successfully overcome two major obstacles – software and standards – to work toward true perfect order,” explains Curtis Dudley, Vice President of Integrated Business Solutions, ROi. “Mercy’s IT infrastructure now incorporates both GS1′s Global Trade Item Numbers, GTINs, and Global Location Numbers, GLNs, to lead to a fully automated synchronization of data with our suppliers.”

Read the full news release.

Connecting the Medical Community – Enterprise Exchange as the Foundation for Accountable Care: An Insightful Industry Brief from IDC

A recent industry brief prepared by Lynne Dunbrack of IDC puts its finger on the pulse of some very important industry trends pointing to the emergence of the “Enterprise Exchange” – Hospital/Provider sponsored Health Information Exchanges that connect a natural medical community – hospital, doctors, diagnostic centers, non acute providers – in order to better coordinate care, manage costs and improve quality. 

Several factors propel the industry in this direction: 

• increasing adoption of EHRs in the affiliated medical community
• greater standardization of data and transactions across transitions of care
• Meaningful Use requirements and incentives
• rising consumer expectations of a connected medical community
• the emergence of reimbursement models, broadly “Accountable Care,”  which call upon the medical community to coordinate care as never before and to share mutual accountability for cost and quality.

While there has been very important progress made at the NHIN, state and regional levels in developing HIEs, the most significant growth, and greatest impact is likely to be at the “Enterprise” level, where hospitals, affiliated providers and others in the medical community will electronically exchange key clinical information in an effort to better coordinate care, streamline care delivery and to raise the quality bar.  A copy of the brief is available here.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

For more information on healthcare solutions, visit Lawson Healthcare online.