Allina Health: Reducing Variations in Clinical Care

February 26, 2019 9:29 am

Although the movement to standards of care and care pathways started in the late 1980s, unwarranted clinical variations in care persist. Such variations are costly in a fee-for-service environment, but they are untenable under value-based care.

In a success story published by Health Catalyst, leaders at Minneapolis-based Allina Health share how the health system’s clinical value program was able to marshal its data assets to identify opportunities for reducing variations in clinical care, thereby reducing costs and improving the organization’s margin by $33 million.^a Allina’s success exemplifies indirect monetization of data analytics through reduced cost and improved performance.

Keys to this success included clearly identifying the consumers for the data (i.e., the physicians), obtaining their support of the objective for the data analysis, and deploying the enabling technologies to mine and mobilize the data required for the work. Another critical success factor in the indirect data monetization was Allina’s ability to quantify the economic impact. Although this success story does not represent a traditional ROI analysis, where the costs of the data analytics are factored into the equation, the margin improvement achieved through the application of the data tools constitute a clear return—and represent just one of many possible opportunities for achieving such results.