Treasure Coast Hospice Harnesses the Power of Data to Grow their Organization

Say goodbye to tedious spreadsheets with customizable KPI dashboards

About Treasure Coast Hospice

With a dedicated team of clinicians, social workers and chaplains, southeast-Florida-based Treasure Coast Hospice (TCH) has won national acclaim for the quality and scope of its hospice and grief support services.

Founded in 1982, TCH has grown to serve more than 3,000 patients on three campuses. This expansion, along with a continuing commitment to patients and their families, led TCH leaders to pursue a technology partner that would help them achieve efficient, person-centered care across their multi-site community.

The quest for accessible actionable data

The expansion of their Hospice census, along with a continued commitment to patients and their families, led Treasure Coast Hospice leaders to search for a technology partner that could help them efficiently provide targeted, personal care across their multi-site community.

KPI Dashboards is a data visualization and business intelligence solution that organizes and presents data from the electronic health record (EHR) in a summarized way that is easy to interpret and share with key stakeholders. This can lead to steady, measurable progress toward well- defined strategic goals.

Before adopting KPI Dashboards, TCH used an EHR system that featured canned reports and didn’t offer easy-to-use dashboard functionality. Staff didn’t have the ongoing ability to get build or edit their own reports. They were completely dependent on the EMR engineer to pull data from the back end of the system and create the updates for them.

You must have KPI…The capability to build all kinds of great reports and dashboards is endless.

Wenona Palombi, Manager of Healthcare Informatics, Treasure Coast Hospice

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Leveraging data to streamline and improve processes

TCH’s Director of Informatics, Wenona Palombi, first became familiar with EHR systems and dashboard tools when she worked for a large hospital healthcare system. She knew what it would be like using a similar system once again at Treasure Coast Hospice. She pushed for her organization to adopt KPI Dashboards right off the bat. “I was impressed with what the product had to offer in terms of dashboards and the multiple drill down capabilities,” Palombi said. “Tools like KPI can get overlooked when in fact they can be some of the most beneficial tools within Healthcare operations.”

KPI Dashboards has helped TCH streamline the process to access census data, admission, discharge transfer (ADT) data, along with statistics for annual reports and board of director meetings. It’s also helped staff identify when there’s a gap in work flow or where data integrity issues are occurring which can be corrected real time.

It’s a huge win in terms of saving time. We have been able to reduce multiple hours spent by each department trying to patch together their own manual reports and still successfully interpret the data. There’s also a win from an employee satisfaction perspective. You can access the dashboards you need quickly and feel confident the data is correct.

Wenona Palombi, Manager of Healthcare Informatics, Treasure Coast Hospice

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Advice for others

When asked what advice to give others about leveraging data analytics, Palombi said:

Take advantage of customization.
The simple drag-and-drop interfaces allow novice users to create flexible, interactive data visualizations that are customizable to track organizational goals, state mandates, federal regulations or national benchmarks.

“Put some skin in the game”
Work with your engineer and put some skin in the game. Help them with ideas of what you need and report examples. Spend a little extra time to get your dashboards built prior to go-live or shortly thereafter.

You don’t have to do it on your own
Go to your key executives or leaders from different departments conducting a “needs assessment”. What reports are they using frequently and can’t live without? Also, make a list of additional KPIs they would benefit from having at their fingertips as you build new reports post go-live.

Get excited!
Palombi said most people typically won’t get excited about working with technology systems because they may not have a collaborative relationship with their vendor. She said that’s certainly not the case with our core Netsmart teams: “I’ve never experienced this type of support from a system vendor that Netsmart myUnity teams provide. I like the fact that the sky’s the limit and we always feel like part of the team.