The hospitals of UnityPoint Health – Des Moines operate under a shared vision “Best outcome for every patient, every time.” To support this endeavor, the three UPH – Des Moines hospitals that offer adult cardiac services use analytics software by Lumedx.
Iowa Methodist Medical Center, Iowa Lutheran Hospital, and Methodist West Hospital together provide over 2,000 diagnostic and interventional cardiac procedures per year. Managing and making sense of the data generated by these procedures is critical to the success of the health network. Lumedx’s Analytics Manager delivers reports, ad hoc querying, and advanced drill-down capabilities so UPH – Des Moines can improve clinical and operational performance.
The software captures a wide range of granular data. “The reports that we were running before had limitations; there was only so much information I could get. Now I’m able to run my reports — including EP, and diagnostic and interventional cath — and I can see the information I need. I can determine the number of pacemakers, the number of ablations we did. I get a better picture of our performance with a few clicks,” said Steve House, director of cardiovascular diagnostic and therapeutic services.
Steve shares analytics reports with physicians and management at monthly co-management meetings so CV stakeholders can see and understand how the service line is currently performing. And if the reports indicate a drop in quality, staff and physicians work to address the problem immediately.
Quality and Compliance
“With Analytics Manager, I can view the measures for ACC NCDR CathPCI Registry and ACTION Registry-GWTG and see everything that we are tracking. I can determine if there is compliance or if there is something wrong with the way we’re documenting,” House said. “But the best part for me is I’m not going through stacks of paper figuring this out. I can pull it up in seconds, and it’s current information, within one day.”
Drill-down functionality and discrete data points allow UPH – Des Moines to uncover the root causes of outliers. For example, if House notices a door-to-balloon time beyond 90 minutes, he can drill down to the individual patient and specific procedure to see what set of circumstances combined to cause the problem. And he can do this without logging into the hospital information system (HIS).
UPH – Des Moines also uses analytics to improve operational efficiency. Management can run a report of all patients, and then use pivot tables to see which days of the week are busiest and which are slowest. This report has been instrumental in managing staffing and call coverage.
Validating Registry Data in Near-Real Time
“Before we were using Lumedx Analytics Manager, we would sometimes discover errors in the data we submitted three to four months after they occurred, when we would get our report from the Registry. At that point we would investigate the error and try to fix it. And of course if there ever was something in our processes that was causing problems with our outcomes, we wouldn’t know for months either. To be successful, we need current data,” said Data Coordinator Denise Clark.
“Our goals are always to track down any outliers and identify what the problem was so we can solve it. This tool enables us to keep track of where we are and where we need to be,” House added.
February 15, 2022 
