Managing Your Data Effectively

An Executive Interview with Pivot Link

How healthcare institutions can use technology to improve their quality of care. By Quentin Gallivan, PivotLink

EHM. Companies and organizations in the healthcare sector are operating in an increasingly complex environment, dealing with a huge amount of electronic data. Why it is important for them to ensure this data is managed efficiently?
Quentin Gallivan. It’s a big challenge, because most companies in the health care industry are challenged with rising costs and increasing mountains of data. Those companies that have gained insight into their data and efficiencies into their processes try to simplify by linking the business owners with IT and focus on specific areas of opportunity…not trying to boil the ocean with massive data warehousing projects.

Two of our customers, Guardian Home Care and Kool Smiles have done just that. In partnership with PivotLink and their technology department, they’ve gained great insight into improving patient care and reducing costs.

EHM. What technology solutions can institutions use to manage their quality of care monitoring, complaint analysis and treatment and outcome data?
QG. Most health care institutions are good at capturing large amounts of information but struggle in extracting and summarizing this data to understand trends or surface exceptions in ways that allow them to systematically improve the quality of care and reduce the overall costs.

Guardian Home Care utilize a business analytics and reporting system to improve the quality and consistency of care delivered to the homes of their patients by tracking the more than 5,000 episodes, at any one time. They use PivotLink to allow their supervisors to go in and look at all these cases in their region or in aggregate to spot trends and exceptions and discover best practices. These supervisors don’t have time to learn a complicated BI tool, the solution has to be intuitive to use but still provide them the ability to drill down into detail needed and interactively investigate the data.

EHM. How can healthcare organizations reduce the cost and complexity of their management reporting?
QG. Understand that less is more. Since health care companies have so much data coming in, it’s important to have the business manager’s focus specifically on what business processes they want to improve, and make sure they partner with the right technology company to deliver that information effectively.

For example, Kool Smiles, run a large network of dental offices, and are focused on providing dental care to underprivileged children. They mine all the data they have, using the PivotLink service, to understand the correlation between good preventative care and the total cost of care. For those patients that don’t have rigorous preventive care programs, more of those patients end up in emergency rooms or require more invasive treatment, which increases the overall cost of care for the patients, providers and payers. Conversely, those patients that take advantage of a preventive care programs reduce the system wide cost of care and enjoy better dental health. Kool Smiles has all analytical data to prove this in PivotLink and can see what regions or areas have the greatest need for their services – and that’s how they look to expand their network.

EHM. How do you see the future of health care data management developing over the next few years?
QG. A big opportunity to support the health care industry’s need to reduce cost and improve the quality of care lies in moving more data to the cloud. The health care industry is an ecosystem of many different participants, from the provider to the payer to the manufacturer, so having information in the cloud that all these parties can access securely will breakdown information silos without costly set up fees or licensing costs of traditional approaches.

The other advantage of cloud computing for the health care industry is the elimination of capital expenditures for IT infrastructure, freeing up CAPEX to be re-deployed to medical equipment technology that directly improves the quality of care. Additionally, cloud computing services provide a more cost effective platform to process and store large volumes of data. What cloud computing needs to do, and what we are focused on, is ensuring that our security infrastructure for all healthcare information transferred, stored and then accessed from the cloud meets or exceeds the standards health care companies maintain in their own systems.

Quentin Gallivan is a prominent SaaS industry executive, having been instrumental in the growth of VeriSign from $30 million to $1.5 billion in revenues. As the former CEO of Postini the leading email security SaaS company, Quentin built the company to large scale with over 11 million users and over 30,000 customers prior to the eventual sale to Google in September of 2007.