Baylor Health Care Uses SAS to Evaluate ROI

Recent surveys indicate that healthcare IT spending may be on the rise for some providers, but budgets are tight nonetheless. How can hospital administrators determine which IT systems are delivering the best return on investment?

Baylor Health Care System expects to find the answer to this question and many others using SAS®Enterprise MinerTM in conjunction with other integrated components of the SAS®9 Intelligence Platform. With the SAS solution, researchers will be able to measure and analyze quality improvement efforts related to the provider’s $119 million clinical transformation initiative.

"Many healthcare providers are making substantial investments in new IT systems largely based on faith," says Jim McPhail, vice president of enterprise services for Baylor Health Care System. "We tapped SAS for powerful, flexible business intelligence software that will help us create synergy between our healthcare research initiatives and our quality improvement efforts."

Spending on the rise
Spending on information technology for healthcare providers is beginning to creep up, according to nearly half of the 307 chief information officers (CIOs) and directors of information systems responding to the 15th Annual Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Leadership Survey.

Better than half of all respondents said their facilities would plan to adopt personal digital assistants (PDAs), bar coding technology and speech recognition over the next two years, and nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had either planned to implement an electronic health record (EHR) system or had already begun the installation of EHR-related hardware and software.

Improving technology, patient care
In 2002, Baylor Health Care System began a seven-year effort to redesign its clinical processes and to seamlessly link information throughout its network of 11 hospitals, 69 clinic sites and numerous physician practices. This clinical transformation includes investments in IT and changes in the way patients are treated – all with an eye toward using evidence-based decision making to improve care.

The goal of the clinical transformation is to generate a single, secure EHR for each patient treated in the Baylor Health Care System. Accessible through a handheld or desktop computer, these EHRs will be extremely valuable to clinical care providers by improving the collaboration between clinicians in the management and delivery of patient care. Of perhaps greater significance in the long term, the use of EHRs will also produce a deluge of clinical data that can be used by biostatisticians and clinical scholars using SAS software to conduct research pertaining to healthcare quality and effectiveness. The insights derived from this research will be deployed in the operationally focused healthcare improvement initiatives of Baylor Health Care System.

"Our clinical transformation encompasses a large number of improvement efforts, including electronic health records, computerized physician order entry, medication management processes and clinical documentation," says Neil Fleming, Ph.D., vice president of healthcare research for Baylor Health Care System. "We will use SAS software to quantify the value of each of these initiatives."

Baylor Health Care System will also use SAS software to sift through vast amounts of data generated internally and available from external sources, including the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), Texas mortality data and national Medicare claims data.

By analyzing information from a wide range of sources, clinical scholars will make an effort to identify certain segments within Baylor Health Care System’s patient population that may respond favorably to clinical intervention. For instance, analysts are planning to use SAS in a randomized trial to evaluate a new program that provides transitional care to elderly patients moving from in-patient to discharge status in an attempt to determine if these treatments can improve outcomes.