Guardian Home Care

Guardian Home Care Holdings provides medical and non-medical home health care services to patients in Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Primarily working under Medicare and Medicaid funding programs, Guardian's health care personnel provide skilled nursing services, physical and speech therapy, social work services, and assistance with daily activities such as cleaning and bathing. The company also provides hospice services in Texas and Tennessee. It operates as Texas Home Health in Texas and under the Guardian name in its other markets.

"Patients expect to be treated effectively and efficiently and with the best possible outcome, and our goal is to exceed their expectations while helping them achieve the highest level of independence in their home," said Mark Lamp, President and Chief Operating Officer of Guardian Home Care.

To achieve continuous improvement in service, Guardian Health determined that they needed a better reporting and analysis system to measure the effectiveness of operational procedures and processes. Guardian implemented a business intelligence (BI) solution based on a Software as a Service (SaaS) modellto achieve better insight into operational performance information at a fraction of the cost of a traditional business intelligence approach. 

Guardian's first priority was to develop episode status reports. Home care is managed through 60-day episodes, and a company as large as Guardian will have more than 5000 active episodes at any one time. Guardian's objective was to develop daily flash reports that summarized the status of each episode.

Lamp added, "Most operational systems in the healthcare industry fail to offer reporting and analysis capabilities that make it easy to synthesize large volumes of detailed data into meaningful management reports. To overcome this challenge in our company, we needed a system that offered the power and scalability to support summary reports, dashboards and ad-hoc analysis, and was easy for our non-technical managers to learn and use."

Rather than produce hundreds of detailed and summary report packages each night that few managers had time to review, Guardian's goal was to enable managers to create consolidated analysis themselves based on cycle time reporting and milestone reporting. This would allow them to drill down into anomalies for additional detail. 

"Since our needs and actions change based on the content of the report, the old paradigm of creating a detailed report specification and waiting for our IT department or vendor to develop a report didn't meet our needs," said Lamp. "Guardian requires insight on daily and historical information to manage the critical processes of our operation in the areas of episode reporting, operational productivity and compliance reporting."

One of Guardian's key selection criteria was that the new system had to be cost effective and offer a rapid payback. The search was narrowed down to an on-demand business intelligence approach that would eliminate the need for large capital investments in hardware, software and IT infrastructure and personnel.

Guardian selected PivotLink as its Software as a Service (SaaS) business intelligence solution vendor in 2008. Using the PivotLink On-Demand system, Guardian can now see the daily aggregation of every patient episode and easily "slice and dice" and drill down into detailed information to perform cycle time and frequency analysis across all the facilities.  

Guardian's senior managers use PivotLink to investigate data and create their own custom metrics, reports and dashboards on current, accurate and actionable data. Information and reports are emailed to decision makers daily, improving the information flow across the entire organization and enhancing collaboration.

Guardian also captures diagnostic codes, patient age, caregiver, referral and procedure outcomes to better understand information such as treatment effectiveness, duration and quality of care. The company plans to expand the system to incorporate peer-to-peer facilities analysis, resource utilization (people) and financial, revenue and billing effectiveness.

"This is just our first phase of automation in the area of process improvements," continued Lamp.  "Our earliest users were supervisors focused on better understanding and monitoring all the critical steps in our 60 day episode cycle. We wanted to ensure that if a step was overdue, or there was an exception in the process, that step was flagged and supervisors had easy access to the information," he said. 

These types of business intelligence applications have been coined "operational BI" by industry analysts as it focuses on the drivers of ongoing organizational effectiveness, not the financial results at the end of a reporting period. This form of operational BI offers the greatest opportunity to influence the outcome - not just report on it after the fact - and the movement among innovative healthcare organizations towards a more collaborative and effective information reporting strategy. 

Guardian Home Care is dedicated to improving home care and strives to offer the highest level of patient care and outcome. PivotLink is proud to be a partner with Guardian as it defines the future of home health care.

"While we are focused on providing the highest level of business intelligence at the lowest overall cost, there is additional satisfaction when we see a company like Guardian utilizing our service to improve the level of care offered to our citizens," said Quentin Gallivan, CEO of PivotLink. "And as a 100% U.S. company, we take a special pride in seeing our technology deployed in US healthcare industry." 

PivotLink (www.pivotlink.com) is the fastest growing "On Demand" business Intelligence Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor, serving over 6,000 business users that produced over 1,000,000 reports and analysis in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone. PivotLink's on-demand reporting, dashboard and analytics solutions empower teams to collaborate inside and outside their organizations. Delivered as a SaaS solution, PivotLink gives enterprises rich analytical capabilities with a pay-as-you-go model that is deployed in weeks, not years, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional BI systems.

Contact details:
Guardian Home Care Holdings, Inc.
Mark Lamp
President and COO