CentraCare Health ID turns to analytics to identify patient trends

Tea Leaves Health product enables it to use business intelligence to make strategic decisions, says Melinda Bemis.


CentraCare Health, an integrated delivery system in Central Minnesota, has implemented an analytics tool that is intended to help the organization make strategy decisions based on patient trends.

The product, called Decisionology, is from Tea Leaves Health, a business intelligence vendor that has developed a suite of similar products looking at customer relationships and the decisions they prompt.

CentraCare, with six hospitals and 27 clinics as well as nursing homes and senior housing services in Central Minnesota was one of six beta sites for Decisionology and now is fully onboarded as a Decisionology client.

Data that CentraCare receives from Decisionology displays customer segmentation information that goes beyond demographics to show the breakdown of patient customers, such as the care mix and services that patients received, as well as downstream utilization and revenue generation potential of key services and patient cohorts, says Melinda Bemis, director of strategic planning and business development at CentraCare. It also shows patients who no longer get care from the provider, opening opportunities to reach back out to the patients.

The organization needed better ways to take data and create actionable tasks, Bemis notes. The adoption of Decisionology moved CentraCare into active use of data analytics supported by a data warehouse and the organization also is working with other providers who could benefit from the analytical tools.

Also See: Decision support solution aims to aid clinicians with personalized care

For example, the Veterans Administration is a key partner of CentraCare and the VA wanted to know how many patients the two organizations share, so Bemis used the tools to find answers so VA and CentraCare could provide a full continuum of care and be more efficient while not providing duplicate services.

“Neurologists are hard to find and recruit and it doesn’t help if the VA is competing with us for neurologists, so we use the same neurologists to serve both organizations,” Bemis says.

Tea Leaves also offers Patientology, a customer relationship management software to hospitals and physicians, as well as its Physicianology physician relationship management software to identify and focus on resources that generate a return on investment.

Bemis also likes that the Tea Leaves platform feeds data into Decisionology, which means that CentraCare does not need to supply any additional data. The vendor also gave guidance in focusing on what types of data to use, such as finding gaps in care.

Decisionology, Tea Leaves’ most recent offering, gathers all practice data in one place to identify trends, strategic marketing activities, customer segmentation, growth trajectories and untapped opportunities.

“To compete in the current healthcare landscape, executives need to more proactively spot trends, anticipate shifts and make business plan adjustments,” says Miki Kapoor, president at Tea Leaves. “Decisionology is a powerful analytics tool that informs key strategic planning priorities such as using patient trend analytics to identify and target both inactive and net new patients.”

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