Luther Midelfort, Mayo Health System

Kelly Court Luther Midelfort Quality Resources Director

Luther Midelfort, Mayo Health System Luther Midelfort is an integrated healthcare system comprised of a 200-physician multi-specialty clinic in eleven communities, four hospitals, 3 nursing homes and a home care agency. Our large size and diversity of services requires us to manage many different measures. Two years ago department managers and senior leaders began complaining about "too many measures". Through a series of focus groups we learned that it wasn't the number of measures, but rather the way we were managing our measures that was the problem.

In the past, measures were stored in thousands of spreadsheet files, on many different computer servers, in multiple locations throughout the organization. This made it difficult for people to find their files and required manual tallying to get system level performance on important measures. With Performance Insight all of the measures are in one place and the system automatically calculates our system level aggregates, making drill-down and roll-up of measures a simple click of the mouse. All of our committees and departments have gone virtually paperless with respect to reviewing measures, with all measure reviews being done online. When a group wants a drill down by department or site the data is instantly available. In the past quality staff would have to look up these questions after a meeting and report back the next time the group met. Many committees and groups only meet monthly so the ability to do an instant drill-down saves a month getting answers to questions. We are now able to efficiently manage over 1700 different measures, with the majority of the measures being collected for four or more departments.

Luther Midelfort has been using the Baldrige criteria as a framework for organizational improvement for several years. The use of Insight’s products was cited in recent Baldrige feedback as a strategic strength. The Baldrige criteria require an organization to have efficient systems to manage data and make it easily available to staff. Another Baldrige requirement is segmentation of data by departments and sites. Insight Health Solutions has allowed Luther Midelfort to demonstrate all of these requirements to examiners in just a few minutes.

Partnering with Insight Health Solutions and using the software products has made a significant improvement in how Luther Midelfort uses data. I believe it is the best improvement we have made to our continuous improvement efforts in the past five years.