Cleveland Clinic Shares Hard-Learned Portal Lessons

Cleveland Clinic’s first effort at building a physician portal to provide performance and quality reports did not go well. Leaders from the large health delivery system shared those lessons at the Medical Group Management Association conference in San Diego.

According to Brett Young, director of business intelligence, the first portal, launched in 2006, met the goals of providing reports but fizzled miserably when it came to user acceptance. Reason? First and foremost, the metrics offered reflected generic enterprise level data not necessarily tailored to the individual physician’s practice. Beyond that, the reports lived in a silo, and were not part of the physician’s annual performance review at the Clinic. The scorecards were also obtrusive, popping up every morning during the physician’s log-in. “In-your-face analytics don’t work very well,” Young said.

Executives at Cleveland Clinic described the exhaustive work that went into building out a new portal, one in play now and which is highly tailored to individual practices and linked to performance reviews. The new executive dashboard includes metrics across finance, quality and patient satisfaction, said Young. Drill-down screens reveal such factors as patient waiting times and adherence to diabetic measures. In addition, the system enables physicians and others to create their own reports driven by metrics of their own choosing.

Development of the new scorecard was driven by a team of 20 physician advisors, who vetted the metrics and made sure they upheld broader enterprise goals linked to pay-for-performance programs, added Michael Mann, business analyst. Data in the reports derive primarily from an Epic Systems electronic health record, while the reports themselves run off SAP presentation software.