How Orchid Health Uses DataDx to Create Healthier Patient Communities and a More Profitable Practice
The problem: Too much data, and too little time
Orchid Health, an Oregon-based, primary care medical practice faced many of the same challenges all private practices do:
- Increasing administrative burdens
- A disadvantage in negotiating contracts without the support of corporate backing
- The ever-present difficulties in finding, hiring, training, and retaining top talent
- Having reliable, real-time data about the practice’s patient population and business performance in order to make educated decisions for their benefit
“DataDx just makes AthenaHealth so much more flexible,” said Roller. “In the past, we’d have to run a report, download it, wait for the data to populate — all of which felt like it took a really long time, but DataDx makes all of this so much easier.
DataDx can help us stop doing duplicative work, and that’s one of our goals. By the end of 2022, we’ll just be using DataDx instead of some of the more manual reporting we’ve been doing.
This will save a lot of time. We can literally go in and click, “run for the quarter,” or “run for the month,” or whatever time frame we’re focused on, and have the report ready for the meeting within five minutes vs. having to take the time to manually populate this info like we have in the past.”
DataDx’s commitment to Orchid Health’s goals lies in helping them to succeed through better insights into their performance and full transparency on the financial health of the practice.
The solution: A relationship with DataDx
DataDx improves data accuracy and integrity
Having clean data that can be distributed to the appropriate parties in the practice in a timely fashion has been an ongoing challenge for the practice, one that they hoped DataDx could help solve.
“For a while, we were facing multiple struggles, with one person wearing three hats, just trying to capture the correct data to get it off to the clinics in a timely manner, and to have processes in place in order for us to have accurate dashboards in place, let alone just having clean data.
We use Athena for our EHR, and we knew that DataDx had successfully worked with other Athena clients, so we wanted their help in cleaning up and verifying our data, and to let us know if there were any issues that they could see.”
For a rural, population-focused, multi-location clinic like Orchid Health, the accuracy of their data is absolutely crucial to understanding the needs of their patient, as well as being able to equitably distribute work to their clinics and providers.
“Our data is now 99 to 100 accurate,” said Roller, “And we’ve been able to isolate any issues we’re having with the data stemming from the manual entry vs. it being a system issue.”
DataDx has not only increased everyone’s confidence in the practice’s reporting, but it’s also identified training needs within the practice, ensuring that any data gaps or inaccuracies can be easily identified and corrected.
“We still do spot checks for validation, of course, so I’m 100% confident that the reports we’re putting out via DataDx are good. If our providers have a confidence issue, it’s that much easier to identify where breakdowns in the data entry process are occurring.
Our Internal Data Project Coordinator is able to work with our teams, like our nurse managers, in order to clarify where certain data points need to go in the system or how they should be labeled — labeling can be a huge factor in the data populating correctly in the system.”
DataDx saves practices valuable time
Time is one of the most valuable resources a practice has, one that is often in short supply. Instead of focusing more time on the needs of the patients and the professional development of staff, many practices are devoting valuable time to administrative tasks. DataDx offers an exciting alternative to the status quo.
“With DataDx, we can populate our dashboards so much more quickly. We knew that we wouldn’t have to wait a month for stuff any more, and that we can actually have confidence on a daily basis that we’re working with the most updated data available.
We send quarterly reports to two organizations — Kaiser and Trillium health — and in order to do everything we need to do to prepare that report, it would normally take at least a couple of hours, and now we can just populate that report almost instantaneously with the information we have from DataDx.
We also have several internal dashboards, like Population Health, Company Health, and Financial Health, not to mention the reports we need to pull for meetings — so there’s a lot there.
Before DataDx, we used to spend a day just doing data entry, and then we’d spend the next day focused on validating the data, and then we’d spend time looking for data gaps, which meant that we’d have to go through patient charts in order to figure it out.
But with DataDx, we’re not doing any of that any more.”
DataDx improves the patient experience
At the end of the day, there’s nothing more important to a clinic than their ability to provide great patient experiences, ones that lead to healthier, happier patient communities. Orchid Health is embracing the power of actionable data in order to make more informed decisions for treatment for their patients, leading to better outcomes for all.
“We’re really trying to think outside the box in terms of how we can serve our patients.
We’re working on a lot of things right now, like focusing on the social determinants of health in our community, in order to create outreach programs, community events like “Walk With the Doc” to fight obesity, and group classes for conditions like diabetes and depression, and we are able to put more programs in placed based off of the data that we’re getting through DataDx.”
DataDx is helping Orchid Health make more informed decisions about their overarching communities, and also about specific patient needs in a more timely fashion.
“Our medical assistants and providers are using DataDx to do scrubs for the patients that are coming in, and they’re able to use that data to refer patients out for procedures like colonoscopies, breast cancer screenings.
Our nurses, who of course are focused on chronic care management, are now using DataDx a lot more, as well for our patients who are managing diabetes and hypertension. With these enhancements, we can quickly identify what patients are at risk because they haven’t been seen in a while, so we can now get them into the clinic more frequently as needed.”
As has been the trend in reimbursements for several years now, as patients become healthier, Payers will pay more. DataDx has helped Orchid Health make more informed decisions about their patient, and in the process, has increased their bottom line.
“In just a few months after integrating DataDx, our data became so much clearer, allowing us to filter certain patients out that don’t need to be in there any more due to a specific condition, and this has done several things for us in the long run. It’s helped our patients become more healthy, Payers are willing to pay more to see increased and better patient outcomes, and we see a financial gain at the end of a reporting period.”
The results: Confidence, improved outcomes, increased profitability, and more!
DataDx’s platform automated Orchid Health’s reporting processes, empowered the staff with reliable, actionable data, and provided full transparency into the practice’s financials, fostering more confident business decisions.
Orchid Health faced a unique set of challenges, and with DataDx’s software and consulting, our partnership strengthened the practice’s teams to promote strong collaboration, clear communication, improved operations, and lasting success, putting them in an even better position to serve their patient community.
DataDx is business intelligence for the 21st Century. To learn more about how DataDx can help you achieve your practice’s goals, or to schedule a demo, contact the DataDx team today!