View Case Studies | Financial Feasibility Modeling | Mission Critical Reporting

Mission Critical Reporting

Every clinician in every health care organization should receive at least one detailed report per month that tells them the important things about their practice, comparing actual with projection and trending data over time. Where possible, internal and external benchmark data should be included so that clinicians can understand their practice and performance in relation to peers within and outside the organization. Reports should be a combination of numbers and "pictures" so that clinicians can more easily spot the trends in the data.

Designing and producing such reports requires significant effort since most practice management software packages are not designed to compile and present such data. Many data warehouse projects have also resulted in less than desirable results because of the complexity and high cost of such efforts.

MCPP¹s approach to report design and development is based on the following ideas:

• Use a "spiral design methodology", which is an approach that defines the highest priority features; develops and implements them; obtains feedback from users; and, based in this information, implements a second, third, etc. round of additional functionality. (In other words, take it one step at a time.)
• Have your first spiral include the development of a Clinician Report that can be used by the majority of the providers in an organization. Add to this one or two Summary Reports that roll up the Clinician Report data into Supervisor and Director Reports.
• Use "readily available" tools such as Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Excel and Crystal Reports. With limited training these tools can be used to produce reports that can be printed, emailed and even distributed through an Intranet or website connected to the World Wide Web.
  
  Acknowledge that may users simply want answers to a variety of questions rather than having fancy reports. This includes answering such questions as, "How many clients did I see with a specific diagnosis?" and "What is the ethnic breakdown of the children seen last year?" Address these data needs by providing "data rectangles" that can be loaded into Microsoft Excel, and then teach people how to use Excel Pivot Tables to sort, sift and summarize the data.