CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
Swedish Medical Center: Sharing Improves
Caring (and Helps the Bottom Line, Too)
Swedish Medical Center (Swedish) needed to understand and communicate
physician and hospital performance across a number of areas—but traditional
FOUNDED: 1910
HEADQUARTERS:
SEATTLE, WA
$10M+
IN IMPROVED OPERATIONAL
PROCESSES
$750K
SAVINGS IN PERSONNEL COSTS
AVOIDED OR RE-DIRECTED
$600K
SAVINGS THROUGH
ELIMINATION OF REDUNDANT
ANALYTICS PLATFORMS
reporting solutions were cumbersome to implement and expensive to maintain.
After implementing Tableau as its
primary enterprise-wide analytics
platform, the healthcare provider is
driving improvements in quality care,
improving patient experiences, and
enjoying substantial savings through
process improvements and improved
efficiencies.
Where Are We—
and Where Do We Need to Go?
Understanding, sharing and, ultimately,
improving performance measures is
always the focus for Swedish.
This ongoing effort has become an even
higher priority as healthcare moves
away from traditional “fee-for-service”
models and transitions aggressively to
value-based reimbursement models.
Under these new models, organizations
will face reduced payments if they miss
targets for factors such as readmission
rates, patient satisfaction and other
performance measures.
Swedish tracks and communicates
an array of performance metrics, but
it needed to find a way to do so more
effectively and less expensively—and to
tie those efforts to driving organizationwide performance improvement.
For example, historically Swedish
tracked readmission rates, but the work
was time consuming and resourceintensive, leading to substantial lag times
between patient care and reporting.
“Different groups in the organization
were using spreadsheets to gather and
organize readmissions data, and it was
very time consuming for analysts and
managers. Collecting all the data and
trying to get good reports took time away
from more valuable tasks. Everyone from
the CEO to the managers thought there
was a better way to solve this problem,”
says David Delafield, CFO of Swedish
Medical Group, a division of the Swedish
organization.
While Swedish sends patient experience
surveys to more than 15 percent of its
patients each year, the organization
lacked a simple, centralized way to
share the results with internal staff and
physicians.
“We would get tens of thousands of
survey responses,” Delafield says.
“We shared the results, but it was very
inconsistent. Everyone was looking at
different things, and some didn’t look
at the results at all.” As a result, it was
difficult for Swedish providers and
administrators to consistently move in
the same direction on patient experience
metrics.
“It’s hard if people can’t
go to one spot for
everything they need—
it makes it really
difficult to align.”
—David Delafield,
Swedish Medical Center
In addition to preparing for value-based
reimbursement, Swedish wanted to
improve other areas like operating room
efficiency, physician engagement and
financial performance.
“The Cost Would Expand
Indefinitely”
Delafield, who has a finance and
technology background, led a team
tasked with selecting and implementing
a platform to help Swedish understand
and share performance metrics in order
to drive improvements.
“The lack of actionable data was a big
issue,” says Delafield. “We had no lineof-sight, visual way to look at things that
were very important to the organization.”
“It’s hard if you have one technology
platform for revenue data, another for
quality, another for patient experience—
and people can’t go to one spot for
everything they need,” Delafield says. “It
makes it really difficult to align.”
This fractured approach created a
growing need for expensive analyst
support.
“There were just too many random,
custom reports which made it really
difficult to coordinate efforts on key
levers. Keeping overhead costs down
is important so we wanted to find a
relatively inexpensive but effective way
to made data actionable for operators
and physicians,” says Delafield. “With so
much custom reporting—the overhead
cost would expand indefinitely if we
didn’t get control of it.”
“Our analysts would fulfill a lot of ad hoc
requests, which are all pretty similar but
for different audiences,” Delafield says.
“And they were doing it over and over
again, which became very expensive
and made it very difficult to get a line of
sight to what was happening across the
company.”
“We Wanted Tableau to Be the
Solution for the Company”
By late 2012, Swedish was looking at a
few potential options to meet its shortand medium-term requirements: IBM,
SAP and Tableau.
“We were very familiar with IBM and
SAP; we knew what they could do,” he
says. “But we also knew some of the
issues that they couldn’t address. And
we wanted our solution to be accessible
and effective for everyone in the
organization, not just analysts.”
The Swedish analytics team
experimented with building smaller views
in Tableau 7, the most current version
available at the time.
“We had done enough to know that
we could build this integrated platform
using Tableau,” he says. “We didn’t want
this solution to be a niche visual tool for
analysts; we wanted Tableau to be the
solution for the company.”
They initially had some concerns. “We
weren’t sure about using Tableau Server
with massive amounts of users and lots
of data,” he admits. “But we’ve been able
to expand to more and more people with
only a few issues—and Tableau 8 solves
a lot of those. We’re in the process of
upgrading now.”
Swedish began with a limited number of
visualizations supported by a small team
of analysts. “It took them very little time
to get up to speed on Tableau,” says
Delafield.
“We’re just starting this
process but we’re seeing
a lot of improvement in
many of these areas by
making data simple and
easily accessible for
operators and physicians.
It has been a companywide effort.”
—David Delafield,
Swedish Medical Center
The initial dashboards debuted to a
small audience—but demand quickly
outpaced expansion plans.
reporting platform, everyone is looking at
a “single version of the truth.”
“I think this simplification, at low
cost, is going to be a really important
foundation for Swedish to meet strategic
goals. Everyone—operating room
surgeons, medical directors, hospital
administrators—over time will funnel
to this same spot, across the hospitals
and the medical group,” says Delafield.
“Everyone involved has done a great job.”
“It was very organic and viral. We had
a lot of emails each week from people
wanting to get access,” says Delafield.
“Now we’re to the point where we’re
“We’re just starting this process but we’re
bringing a lot of new users onto the
seeing a lot of improvement in many
platform each week and we know it’s
of these areas by making data simple
having a big impact around alignment
and easily accessible for operators and
and simplification. Our focus now will
physicians. It has been a company-wide
be on expanding views and answering
effort,” says Delafield.
new business questions.
Physicians will drive a lot of
Primary Care Physician Scorecard
the movement towards value
Swedish Ballard Primary Care
based healthcare so the
P E R F O R MA NCE
P R O F IL E
In S ystem
P hysician
Swedish team is working really
R eferral R ate
C apacity
hard to engage physicians
%
%
wherever possible”
S tatus / T arget
P ractice
(A vg / You)
S MG
(A vg / You)
%/
86% (7 of 11)
93% (134 of 149)
S MG
A chievement
(current month)
(current month)
G E NE R AL OP E R AT IONS
AVS
The current team comprises
three technical resources
and three fulltime report
developers. “It’s not a very
large team to build what
Swedish has created. It’s been
a significant value—a great
ROI and will allow us to retire
most of the other reporting
solutions across Swedish,”
Delafield says.
Objective and Transparent
Now that Swedish Medical
Center is quickly moving
towards using Tableau as
its primary enterprise-wide
performance analysis and
%
C los edC hart
100% / 97%
99% (1 of 11)
98% (1 of 149)
MyC hart
62% / 50%
58% (4 of 11)
52% (50 of 149)
12 Month
R olling
T op 5%
T otal Unique P atients
P AT IE NT E X P E R IE NC E
O verall As s es s ment
Likelihood of recommending (n=88)
85% / 80%
79%
76%
P ers onal Is s ues
O ur s ens itivity to patients ' needs (n=82)
1,657
% F emale
72%
P C P P atients
1,008
% F emale
78%
79% / 80%
71%
69%
C ourtes y of regis tration s taff (n=88)
70% / 80%
74%
71%
< 18 yrs
0%
E as e of s cheduling appointments (n=89)
18 - 44 yrs
41%
45 - 64 yrs
33%
> 64 yrs
26%
Age D emographics
Acces s
58% / 80%
59%
60%
Likelihood of recommending C P (n=90)
82% / 80%
80%
79%
C P explanations of prob/condition (n=90)
83% / 80%
77%
78%
Information about delays (n=62)
67% / 80%
60%
53%
W ait time at clinic (n=83)
74% / 80%
60%
53%
C are P rovider
P ayor Mix
Moving T hrough Your Vis it
C ommercial 62%
Medicare 35%
C HR ONIC C AR E
Medicaid
1%
S elf
1%
O ther
2%
Diabetes
Hba1c>9% (1/48)
3% / 15%
11% (3 of 11)
LDL<100 (37/48)
77% / 50%
70% (3 of 10)
58% (9 of 124)
BP <140/80 (27/48)
56% / 50%
52% (3 of 15)
53% (54 of 127)
Incentive Meas ure (41/48)
12% (23 of 125)
85% / 80%
76% (5 of 11)
68% (32 of 126)
LDL<100 (16/40)
40% / 70%
39% (4 of 11)
42% (61 of 120)
BP <140/90 (33/40)
82% / 70%
71% (3 of 11)
69% (22 of 123)
2% / 2%
3% (4 of 12)
4% (33 of 137)
Breas t C ancer S creening (254/337)
75% / 80%
67% (2 of 10)
63% (15 of 116)
C ervical C ancer S creening (357/489)
73% / 80%
64% (4 of 11)
67% (33 of 119)
C olorectal C ancer S creening (190/317)
59% / 60%
% (1 of
43% (17 of 117)
T op 15%
R isk Adjustment
C HD
Hypertens ion
BP >140/90 (24/1273)
C urrent
Month
HC C
0.352
0.352
R AF
0.796
0.796
HC C
0.392
0.392
R AF
0.860
0.860
S MG
P R E V E NT AT IV E C AR E
)
B as eline
You
T op 15%
T op 15%
P R O DUC T ION
J un
J ul
Aug
S ep
O ct
Nov
Dec
J an
F eb
Mar
Apr
May
T otal
Vis its
297
277
330
264
243
289
251
302
261
273
290
292
3,369
P atients
267
246
299
224
226
254
233
268
231
244
263
272
3,027
202
193
183
166
182
207
167
209
169
191
182
196
2,247
P C P P atients
New P atients
wR VU's
8
7
6
1
8
2
1
8
8
10
6
8
73
352
337
398
314
289
353
292
345
320
339
355
359
4,054
Reporting Period: M ay 2013
Last Updated: 6/13/13 10:00 AM
Providers can quickly see their performance on a variety of measures.
—David Delafield,
Swedish Medical Center
experience survey results in Tableau,
helping them to understand how they are
perceived by patients.
Employees now have a clearer
understanding of the metrics on which
they are evaluated as well as the ability
to compare their performance levels
with those of their peers, both within the
organization and even across the state
and the nation.
“We have taken 35,000 survey results,
and put them in one spot,” Delafield
says. “The providers can see what
patients are saying about them,
specifically, or about their clinic in
addition to how they rank against their
peers internally and externally.”
“We’re trying to make most key levers
in the organization completely objective
so Swedish can accurately measure
performance and have a certain amount
of accountability, ,” says Delafield.
“Where possible we want decisions to be
very data-driven.”
“Combining this platform with operational
teams has allowed Swedish to see
significant movement on patient
experience. These simple, consistent
views tie into operations and help to
drive change,” he says.
“We can see readmissions for the entire
Swedish system,” says Delafield.
“The Swedish readmissions dashboard
is built to be automated and match
national definitions. The team that works
on readmissions can focus on moving the
rate down and not on collecting data.”
Employees can also see patient
Swedish has been able to freeze analyst
hiring as well, converting several existing
analysts into Tableau power users to
build the views used on Vantage.
“We were able to stop the expansion
of hiring more and more report writers
to build every possible report that you
can build.” Delafield estimates that once
fully implemented this will save Swedish
approximately $750,000 each year.
Monthly Trend of Heart Failure (HF) Readmission Rate
0%
Readmission Rate
“We can see
readmissions for the
entire Swedish system,”
Providers can quickly see their
performance on a variety of
measures.
0%
0%
0% has easy, at-a-glance views of its readmission rates.
Swedish
And the analysts are happier working in
Tableau, too. “Oh, they love it. Solving key
business problems and working with end
users on what a visual interaction might
look like? It’s a gratifying place to be.”
Overall, Tableau has
helped us capture
efficiencies and
process improvements
that we estimate to be
valued at tens of
millions of dollars.
—David Delafield,
Swedish Medical Center
“This implementation has helped us put
a strong foundation in place to move in
the direction we need to move,” says
Delafield. “It has really helped the whole
company catch up in the reporting and
analytics space.”
He also says that the analysts appreciate
that once a visualization is finished, it
can be refreshed automatically as the
data updates. “Once you do it once
and automate it, it’s done. You never
have to do it again for the company, and
everyone is looking at that one thing,”
Delafield says.
Overall, Delafield sees Tableau as
part of the Swedish journey towards
business transformation and, ultimately,
more efficiently serving the needs of the
patients and communities it serves.
“Just about everyone in healthcare has
or is going to have an Electronic Medical
Record. We’re trying to take the next
step, which is working on using data to
understand our performance and using
that understanding to drive movement
toward achieving our strategic goals.
Eventually, we hope this platform will
help us improve not only our internal
performance but potentially change the
way that we interact with our customers,
the patients,” he says.
Swedish has seen a great deal of value
from the insight is has gained from its
Tableau implementation.
“Overall, Tableau has helped us capture
efficiencies and process improvements
that we estimate to be valued at tens of
millions of dollars,” says Delafield.
“Taking the Next Step”
Both the Swedish organization and the
analytics group have gained positive
exposure from their successful use of
Tableau.
“Tableau has helped to improve our
operations. And we’re a good-sized
system, so it’s pretty exciting.”
Press Ganey Scores M edical Group
S ervice L ine
Medical G roup
S ite/F acility
S wedis h G reenlake P rimary C are
P rovider
All
Date O ption
Dis charge / S ervice Date
R eceived Date
Monthly T rend by Q ues tion
Date R ange
4/1/2012 to 4/30/2013
Monthly trend line (below) is for the question: L ikelihood of recommending
90%
85%
80%
A ge
All values
83.5%
T arget =
82.5%
S pecialty
75%
Apr-12
R es pons es
85
May-12
98
J un-12
112
J ul-12
Aug-12
S ep-12
O ct-12
Nov-12
Dec-12
J an-13
91
85
114
87
89
106
94
F eb-13
138
Mar-13
122
Apr-13
103
S ex
All
Now providers can hear and react to patient feedback.
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