Using Diver to Improve Quality and Decision Making

Elevating Quality and Decision Making

Finance Department Success and Expansion

Originating in the finance department in 2004, Dimensional Insight’s analytics solution achieved success in saving time, cutting expenses, and boosting productivity, leading to its expansion into quality and clinical areas within Sarasota Memorial Health Care System.

Quality Improvement and Merit Increase Calculations

The analytics software played a pivotal role in Sarasota Memorial’s quality department, facilitating routine surveys linked to merit increase calculations. The platform enabled chart audits, nursing interviews, and environmental care rounding, with the results presented on scorecards for performance evaluation.

Safety Improvement with AHRQ Survey Integration

The quality department utilized the analytics software for safety improvement, integrating the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) Safety Culture Survey. The software’s dashboard featured survey components, presenting results as percentages, bar graphs, or written comments, allowing users to filter results based on current or past surveys.

Swift COVID-19 Impact Assessment

Dimensional Insight’s analytics software empowered Sarasota Memorial Health Care System to rapidly develop dashboards, aiding in comprehending the immediate impact of COVID-19 within the organization.

Holistic Insights for Reopening

Dimensional Insight’s analytics solution’s versatility extended beyond COVID-19, with plans to utilize it for understanding service volumes, outcomes, and financials during the hospital’s phased reopening of elective services.

Key takeaways

Dimensional Insight’s Diver Platform enabled Sarasota Hospital to quickly develop dashboards to help it understand the impact of COVID-19 within its four walls.

Diver Platform will also be used to understand service volumes, outcomes, and financials as the hospital reopens its elective services.

Data governance features allow users at Saratoga Hospital to be confident in the numbers and ensure the definitions of measures are being understood in a consistent manner across the hospital.

Background

Sarasota Memorial Health Care System is among the largest public health systems in Florida. It is a full-service health system with specialized expertise in heart, vascular, cancer, and neuroscience services, and has a network of outpatient centers, long-term care, and rehabilitation centers.

Sarasota Memorial started working with Dimensional Insight in 2004. It originally used The Diver® Platform (Diver®) in its finance department, setting up daily dashboards that the hospital has used to help save time, cut expenses, and boost productivity. The hospital has since expanded its use of Diver into quality and clinical areas.

Improving Quality and Safety with Diver

Once the finance department was able to see improvements with Diver, Sarasota Memorial expanded its use to other areas, such as the quality department.

For example, management and director-level staff conduct routine surveys that are linked to staff merit increases. The surveys include chart audits, nursing interviews, and environmental care rounding. All of the information gathered is exported into a
Diver script using Integrator, Dimensional Insight’s ETL tool, and is then shown on a scorecard.

The scorecard shows an overall score with how everybody performed, and this is linked to merit increase calculations. Managers and staff can also use the scorecard to see which specific areas staff members are performing well on and which ones need improvement. The scorecard is available for most staff to see either in email or on a DivePort site.

“Diver is essential to getting our quality and safety scorecards, as well as the results,” says Jacquelyn Zaleski, Decision Support Quality Analyst at Sarasota Memorial.

Another way that the quality department uses Diver is for safety improvement. The Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) puts out a Safety Culture Survey that asks staff what they think of the safety culture of their organization. Sarasota Memorial put all of the AHRQ’s calculations into Integrator to develop a Diver dashboard featuring each component of the survey. The results can be shown as percentages, bar graphs or as written comments on the survey. Users can filter the results of the current survey or ones from the past.

Moving Forward

Diver continues to pick up momentum at Sarasota Memorial. In addition to the nurses and staff members who use the platform for their dashboards and scorecards, the emergency room director and leadership team have increased their use of ProDiver. The hospital is empowering more departments to build on the Diver usage. “We’re trying to do more,” Zaleski says. “This is all just the beginning of what we’d like to do with Diver.”

Next, Zaleski would like to increase the organization’s use of Diver for clinical tracking. The hospital is also hoping to upgrade to Spectre, Dimensional Insight’s new platform technology, for increased speed and performance.

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Organization

Sarasota Memorial Health Care System

Industry

Healthcare

Location

Sarasota, Florida

Customer since

2004

Website

www.smh.com

Solution

Diver Platform

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