Carolinas HealthCare

System: Consumer Analytics

 1. Why has CHS invested in DA?

➔ Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS) invested in Data Analytics (DA) to improve the value of healthcare
provided by offering innovative tools that support clinicians in the provision of the best possible care to
patients

➔ The integrated healthcare analytics has been brought into the CHS for evidenced-based population health
management, individualized patient care, and predictive modeling

➔ DA offers centralization and standardization of analytics, which allows CHS to direct and use it’s capability
for knowledge sharing and informed decision making to improve patient care

➔ CHS realised DA would improve its ability to use data, not only for reporting purposes and understanding
CHS’s business, but also for predicting outcomes and making informed decisions

➔ CHS realised that the future of healthcare is being fundamentally changed by data and technology, and the
quality of care is sustainable and dependent upon the ability to understand and use data in a meaningful
way
2. How successful has DA been so far? Why?

Soon after its launch DA started receiving twice as many requests as it capacity. This shows the success rate of
DA. They did not only serve the external customers but they also served the internal customer who demands
went beyond the team’s capacity. There was a huge potential for DA to become an additional revenue stream
by outsourcing its analytics services to third parties in future.

The reasons for success of DA2 are as follows:

● Till now, 1/3rd of clinical work was non-standard (that is, decisions were taken in ad-hoc manner, not
backed by data). But since the healthcare industry was moving to fee-for value approach, more and
more data-driven decisions were required
● Though DA2 operated as a cost-centre, it undertook all the strategic initiatives. Thus, this group was
part of corporate strategy
● The key to success of DA2 was continuing commitment to build strong relationships with the physicians
and nurses.
3. What types of analytics techniques that you you learnt, Carolinas
used? Describe in brief.

Descriptive Analytics: Descriptive analytics is the type of statistics that provide descriptive analysis of what
is evident from the data. Based on this type of analysis it is possible to find out current trends, statistics of
available data. This type of analytics tries to answer the question of what has happened

Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics is type of analytics where future of a process, product or activity
can be predicted based on the result of the descriptive analytics. This type of analytics tries to answer the
question of what could happen.

Prescriptive Analytics: Prescriptive analytics is the most active type of analytics where the optimum output
can be prescribed based on results of descriptive and predictive analytics. This type of analytics tries to
answer the question of what should happen.
4. What are Dulin’s most important challenges going forward?

● Even though a lot of insights were obtained from DA2, it was challenging to
convert them to actions
● DA2 needs high amount of investment and the return for the same has to be
recovered
● DA2 technology had more internal requirements which stopped him to test it in
the external market
● Dulin was recruited to help execute on CHS’s vision of creating a unified, data
driven system

As Dulin and his team prepared their strategic plan for the next three years, he
pondered which of the existing pilots might be extended to different yet related issues
without requiring the design and implementation of an entirely new model.
5. Which organizations are best-placed to provide integrated data
management for individual patients?

The following organizations are best placed to provide integrated data management:

● A distributed data system

● A corporate data warehouse
● A scalable data model
● Having high quality data
● Having patient segmentation data
● Right data governance policies
THANK YOU