Case Studies

National Health Information System Improves Quality of Care

Project at a Glance
RDA created a Web-based, centralized repository for data collection and reporting of hospital statistics for NALTH. The participating hospitals now can easily enter data into the system and generate comparison reports to view industry trends, leading to improved quality of patient care and efficiencies in budgeting.

About Our Client

RDA's client, The Lewin Group, is a premier national healthcare and human services consulting firm. Lewin's strategic and analytical services help clients:

improve policy and expand knowledge of healthcare and human services systems
enact, run, and evaluate programs to enhance delivery and financing of healthcare and family services
deal with shifts in healthcare practice, technology, and regulation
optimize performance, quality, coverage, and health outcomes
create strategies for institutions, communities, governments, and people to make healthcare and human services systems more effective.

Background

Comprised of approximately 70 hospitals and facilities, the National Association of Long-Term Hospitals (NALTH) needed a central repository for data that could be updated and accessed by its member hospitals. Prior to this project, they had no way to compose or review statistics of long-term hospitals throughout the nation. RDA worked with The Lewin Group to build a National Health Information System for NALTH.

Solution Detail

The National Health Information System provides an easily accessible central repository for data collection and report generation. It has a Web-based input interface which enables hospitals to enter data on a quarterly basis using various submission file formats. Managed by The Lewin Group, the database captures hospital financial information, details of patient discharges and quality measures.

Participating hospitals are able to run reports from the system that benchmark, trend and compare their facility's data to that of other hospital groups based on specific parameters, such as geography or hospital size. The reports also incorporate secondary data from hundreds of hospitals throughout the United States.

Analyzing these statistics serves the industry through timely response to government initiatives on payment rates and patient classifications as well as enables hospitals to ultimately improve the quality of care that the patients are getting as well as the budgetary efficiency of their facilities.

Technically Speaking

This project incorporated Microsoft .NET technology, relying heavily on SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. The data files that the hospitals submit are CSV files, which the application front-end translates into XML. The system has been written so that the hospitals can program their own internal systems to create the XML directly and submit that instead of using the intermediate CSV file.