Statware´s Statit Custom QC Benefits Customizable user interfaces Automation of routine operations Execution of external programs Creation of new commands www.statware.com

Health Care Leader Employs Quality Improvement Software

Intermountain Health Care is a full-service health care organization providing primary, urgent and specialty care in hospitals, urgent care centers, surgical centers, home care agencies and neighborhood clinics. A charitable, nonprofit provider, Intermountain Health Care has turned to Statware software to help it achieve its mission of supplying the highest quality health care at the lowest possible cost.

To that end, Intermountain Health Care adopted Statware's Statit Custom QC software to refocus its quality efforts. "Our main work is to extend our management accountability systems from a traditional facilities-management, financial accounting model to a clinical model, where we track and manage the key clinical processes by which we treat patients," says Dr. Brent James, executive director of Intermountain Health Care's Institute for Health Care Delivery Research. "Given that 'you manage what you measure,' we have to extend our efforts beyond the financial measures that have traditionally driven health care delivery systems. We are building the capability to track medical outcomes, satisfaction outcomes and costs in parallel, along clinical processes of care so that we can manage them together."

Statit Custom QC is a completely customizable quality control solution. Users can construct custom quality systems based on Statit's powerful statistics and graphics engines according to their own needs. Statit is commonly used to customize user interface screens such as data entry, dialogs and menus. Typical applications of Statit's procedure-writing capabilities include automation of routine operations, execution of external programs and creation of new commands to adapt the program for specific uses.

Statit is just one element of Intermountain Health Care's heavy investment in both information technology and organizational processes that allows it to capture, maintain and access data about patient encounters, care outcomes, demographics, costs and facility operations. The health care provider expended considerable cost to migrate to a central data repository, dubbed the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Intermountain Health Care launched a wide-area network to serve as its communications infrastructure, allowing users at the 23 hospitals, more than 60 clinics and other affiliated sites to access the data warehouse for information. Intermountain Health Care developed a coordinated quality management program that involves stakeholders at the corporate office, quality management personnel at each facility, medical staff and administrators. Finally, Intermountain Health Care converted to electronic medical records, based in the EDW, that support inpatient and outpatient care delivery and directly drive financial and administrative systems.

 "We needed a package that allowed us to customize the user interface, implement specialized statistical methods and, especially, control graphic output," says James. "Statit was the only analytic tool that even came close to the level of support we needed to move our improvement efforts ahead across hundreds of teams in scores of facilities."

James lists several of Intermountain Health Care's reasons for choosing Statit:

 Sophisticated statistical capabilities.

 A "transparent back end" into Intermountain Health Care's data warehouse.

 The ability to control graphical output in detail.

 Programmable statistics.

 A fully controllable graphic user interface and command line interface.

 Because Statit is so customizable, Intermountain Health Care was able to implement its use throughout the organization. The corporate office is using Statit for a number of quality initiatives such as tracking protocols, performing epidemiological studies and directing randomized control trials.