Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »CIO —
In the grand scheme of things, 12 percent of anything isn't much. It's a dime and some pennies out of a dollar, the merest sliver of a whole pie. But when 12 percent describes a group of people dying, the figure suddenly looms ugly and huge. That's the percentage of pneumonia patients at Norfolk, Va.-based HMO Sentara Health System who died in 1993 and 1994. Although lower than the national average of about 14 percent, the number still seemed too high to Sentara's doctors. What's more, a good many other pneumonia sufferers developed complications requiring expensive antibiotics and an average stay of two weeks, as opposed to the optimal three- to five-day stay of appropriately treated pneumonia patients without complications, says Robert D. Brickman, Sentara's medical director of clinical effectiveness.
The doctors at Sentara always knew something was wrong. When they ordered sputum cultures for pneumonia patients, they wouldn't hear back from the lab for several daysif at all. Without lab results, they could only guess what was wrong and how best to treat it; meanwhile, patients got sicker as they waited for results. Yet it wasn't until Sentara's quality improvement team began an exploratory mining foray into claims data in its Oracle-based data mart that the doctors' suspicions were confirmed. Besides uncovering the high pneumonia mortality and complication rates, the team noticed that doctors were ordering sputum cultures many times for the same patient; upon inspection, they learned that the doctors did so in hopes that at least one test would yield useful, timely information. The quality team quickly devised a new system of transferring the culture from the patient to the lab, and the lab results back to the doctor within two hours. Not only did the mortality rate for pneumonia patients fall to 9 percent, but their average stay dropped to one week and the cost of managing a single pneumonia case decreased by $2,000. "Attack the quality of health care, and amazingly the costs come down as well," says Bert Reese, Sentara's corporate director for information systems.
The process that led Sentara to improve the quality and efficiency of care for its pneumonia patients is known in the health-care industry as "outcomes measurement." A form of data mininga means of searching for previously unknown, actionable information from large databasesoutcomes measurement involves examining clinical encounter information, insurance claims and billing data to measure the results of past treatments and processes. By understanding what workedor didn'tproviders can identify areas for improvement or capitalize on successful methods.