Vituity
Headquarters: California, USA
Industry: Healthcare
Customer: Since 2020
Data Types Mastered with Profisee
Hear from Jenny, Enterprise Data Analytics at Vituity
Who is Vituity?
The Problem
The Approach
Who is Vituity?
Vituity is a physician-led and -owned Partnership that combines clinical excellence with business acumen to help healthcare organizations raise the standard of patient care and improve their performance metrics. Their largest practice line is emergency medicine, but their clinical footprint has expanded rapidly over the last decade to include additional practice lines like Hospitalist Medicine, Critical Care, Anesthesiology and more. Vituity now operates in 18 states with over 400 practice locations, which serve 6.5 million patients annually. Within those practice locations, they have 3,000+ Physician Partners and 1,400+ Advanced Partners.
The Problem
With Vituity’s growing footprint in the healthcare field, a substantial amount of data was flowing in from multiple data sources that then had to be properly validated and merged. Dealing with these ‘siloed’ data sources resulted in redundant effort, poor visibility, operational errors and inefficiency – none of which was acceptable for a fast-growing business.
This does not mean the data from the source systems was “bad” – only that it had been created in each system under differing rules and requirements and that some consistency had to be imposed so they could have a single, integrated source of truth for reporting, decision-making and operational efficiency.
The Approach
Vituity looked at a few approaches to solving their ‘data silo’ problem that they found would not work:
- They considered using existing applications as “master data sources” but found that these systems cannot manage data in other systems.
- They also tried custom coding to merge data into a custom-built data warehouse, but this proved to be a lot of effort, difficult to maintain and provided no visibility into matching or survivorship rules.
Ultimately, Vituity chose to move forward with Profisee MDM to accommodate multiple key master data domains and the data interactions around them. Vituity also noted that they needed to develop improved processes around data governance and that their MDM implementation would exceed their needs in a short time frame.
THE SOLUTION
Vituity immediately recognized that they would need to master multiple data domains to drive the broad business requirements, so multi-domain functionality was key in their MDM selection.
“Start with 1 domain for simplicity, but there is no chance there is any business that only has one domain to be mastered.”
- Provider, e.g., doctors, nurses, other healthcare providers
- Payer Contracts, e.g., insurance companies
- Facility/Location, e.g., practice lines, hospitals
- Reference Data Management
- Patient
Like most healthcare organizations, Vituity must manage their Provider data (doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers) for both business and compliance reasons. More than any other master data entity, Provider data impacts many parts of the business, from reporting to time scheduling. For this reason, Provider data lives in many source systems from credentialling to billing and legal — and all that data must be matched, merged, validated and corrected if it is to be used as a trusted source of information. Cleaning and harmonizing Provider data across these systems reduces billing errors and inconsistencies, avoids redundant effort and enables accurate reporting.
Vituity works with healthcare providers in several locations, but simple spelling errors (or discrepancies like “St Lukes” or “Saint Luke’s”) caused confusion and took precious time to correct. By mastering Facility/Location data once and having all other systems use that as their ‘reference,’ Vituity was able to avoid most of these simple errors and duplicative work.
The Patient domain was a natural focus for Vituity when they started their MDM journey. Their goal was to enable the tracking of patients throughout their care experience — resulting in high-quality care and better metrics for the quality of care, including readmission rates and accurately tracking the same patient across the continuum of care — while avoiding redundant data-entry work.
Vituity partners with several different insurance companies across the healthcare sector. By mastering the Payer Contracts domain, they will be able to standardize insurance companies’ names and contract details across their organization, allowing Vituity to share consolidated, corrected and harmonized Payer Contracts data immediately across all business units.
This enables the SCC procurement team to more accurately forecast store product item inventory demand. From here, the data science team can apply machine learning to their supply chain commodity providers to help optimize costs and ensure stores have the materials they need to operate and customers have access to their favorite regional products.
While reference data can span a wide variety of use cases, the core approach is to take reference data that may be used across several systems and master it as a series of MDM domains that can become a common reference for all the systems that need it. In the case of Vituity, they plan to centralize CPT codes, ICD-9/10 codes, and CCS Diagnostics codes, among others. This reduces redundant effort across systems and avoids the possibility of different version of the reference data being used in different systems.
THE WINS
Vituity started with the goal of improving the consistency, accessibility and usability of their data. But unlike several companies who are new to MDM they did not limit their thinking to only one master data domain or use case. They thought ahead to consider all the major domains that impacted their business and built a phased delivery plan, knowing they would likely have to accommodate even more in time.
We knew that once
we started this journey…
… that other business owners would come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Hey! Help us with this problem,’ and we would have a ready solution. Benefits
There are many benefits of data mastering, but they generally fall into two categories:
Reporting, metrics and insight – Without consistent trusted data, it is not possible to create meaningful reports or get insight into how the business is running, spanning metrics from utilization to profitability. It also enables critical insights around effective healthcare delivery and clinical-quality metrics like readmission rates.
Operational efficiency – Synchronized, trusted data means reduced data entry, errors and duplicative work — and that impacts all areas of the business, from accurate credentialling to patient scheduling and billing. Well-managed data also enables management to identify and then implement necessary changes with speed and efficiency.
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