Robust Data and Analytics Environment Provides Radiology Organization with a Diagnosis for Growth

This premier physician-owned radiology organization has a vision to make radiology better, improve lives, and deliver best-in-class patient care. They serve a network of member partners—radiology groups, imaging centers, etc.—by providing them with modern technology, data and analytics solutions, and a platform to share ideas and best practices that help improve processes and patient outcomes.

When members join this partner program, they get access to innovative technology, equipment, and insights that would likely not be accessible or affordable for an independent practice or imaging center.

The organization is invested in the success of their partners and knows that data and analytics is the path to providing superior service and expanding their member network.

The radiology organization has been experiencing rapid, nationwide expansion and currently boasts more than 4,500 members, operates in more than 180 outpatient imaging centers across 15 states, and performs approximately 8 million radiology reads per year.

With this growth comes large volumes of data. Their goal is to improve the way they work with their data and tap into the wealth of information so that they can:

• make strategic decisions to support continued growth goals; and
• improve their data and analytics service offering for their partners.

The radiology organization was analyzing data manually using spreadsheets, Access databases, billing system extracts, and HL7 files that enable data transfer between medical applications. Some reports had been developed in Tableau; however, they were not widely adopted by the organization and few users had licenses. While they were ultimately able to get the insights they desired, their manual reporting and analytics process were not scalable and were holding them back from achieving their growth goals.

They wanted to automate the manual processes it took to provide insights to their partners, including:

• Turnaround Time Metrics: Being able to see how quickly other practitioners/practices review images and scans—and why—is one of the most critical metrics for a radiologist and a valuable insight for partners. This information is used to identify outliers, improve processes, adjust staffing needs, and make other informed decisions on how to improve turnaround time.
• Relative Value Unit (RVU) Metrics: An RVU is a measure of value used in the Medicare reimbursement formula for physician services. It takes into consideration the physician’s work, the expenses of the physician’s practice, as well as the physician’s liability insurance to determine how “valuable” the images are (i.e., MRI is more valuable than Xray). Partners compare RVUs in the industry to adjust where necessary and improve their productivity.

Automating these processes would get valuable insights into the hands of partners faster providing them with critical information that will allow them to improve patient care, and it would also save time, money, and resources for the organization to be able to invest in expanding their reach and growing the network.

This premier physician-owned radiology organization has a vision to make radiology better, improve lives, and deliver best-in-class patient care.