ThedaCare is the largest healthcare provider and employer in Northeast Wisconsin, and has gained actionable insights into disease management, patient flows and financial management using QlikView. The deployment to 1,200 business and clinical users strengthens ThedaCare’s commitment to employer plan purchasers and 225,000 patients served annually. As a data intensive business, the organisation uses QlikView to analyse more than 110 million rows of data each day. ThedaCare recovered its entire investment in QlikView’s analytics software prior to completing its full rollout in May.

“QlikView dramatically reduces the time to answer business and clinical questions,” said Brian Veara, ThedaCare’s Manager of Decision Resources. “It is helping ThedaCare transition from standard static reporting to a truly analytical environment where any information can be rapidly accessed, analysed and viewed exactly as needed. This capability is critical to fulfilling our mission to cost effectively improve the health of our community.”

Using QlikView, clinicians now perform disease management analysis in seconds versus the hours, days and weeks they previously had to wait with traditional business intelligence tools. Executives and analysts can rapidly gain information for tracking, analysing, forecasting, controlling and reporting financial and operational performance.

The new QlikView capabilities enable ThedaCare to explore data in its Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system and patient management systems as never before with more robust and flexible analytics applications. Examples include:

• Disease Management applications analyse the root causes for patient outcomes and KPIs for a wide variety of preventive care programs such as immunizations, disease screenings, LDL and blood pressure control, hypertension, anticoagulation medication management and tobacco cessation.
• Patient Care Benchmarks present aggregate information on how clinical teams and doctors perform and how patients respond to treatments
• Service Performance Metrics provide details on lab turnaround times, call centre activity and appointment scheduling.
• Patient Flow Analysis to better understand and plan for how patients enter, use and exit the ThedaCare system. This not only helps the availability and delivery of care, but pinpoints need/risk/reward of expanding a facility, opening a new clinic or offering a new type of service.
• Financial Analysis, in addition to general ledger, AR aging and system-wide financial reporting, improves managing payer mix and physician volumes, negotiating contracts, and controlling expenses down to the cost centre level.

ThedaCare will use QlikView to support its Lean Management practices throughout its organisation. Planned projects include leveraging the new accessibility to its Electronic Medical Records system for creating decision-support innovations that will further improve healthcare value.

Healthcare organisations spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to access and use information for decision support, revenue cycle management, evidence-based medicine, medical records management and supply chain management. The best way to improve care delivery and control costs is to streamline information processes, just like ThedaCare and hundreds of other healthcare providers worldwide are doing with QlikView.

ThedaCare chose QlikView when its data volumes outgrew existing reporting tools. To simply upgrade reporting based on traditional technology would have meant a considerable capital investment in software licenses and hardware, and would have continued burdens on IT staff. QlikView provided a more affordable path to simple and flexible access to information with little or no end user dependence on IT.