It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate demands of your work. That report due on Friday that’s necessary for a big decision? It is a very pressing short-term need. But short-term thinking isn’t going to help your long-term struggles, so let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
You Are Here
Start assembling your data needs. This likely involves input from other people, too. Your supporters (financial supporters, that is) will have information they want. Your Board likely has a long list! Managers or administrative leaders have lists that are just as long, but hopefully a bit more focused. It’s going to feel overwhelming, but collect what you can – and let these people know the process of revamping your reporting is only beginning.
Once you get all the lists together, start identifying the primary needs. They usually fall into at least one of these groups:
- Legally required
- Directly support key decisions or strategies
- Demonstrate impact to key stakeholders
- Necessary to secure or maintain funding
If this is your first time through this process, include needs that already have reports. If you’re coming back to this step after meeting your essential needs – then include needs that have reports, but exclude the reports you just finished building.
Evaluating Internal Needs
You usually can’t do much to change the needs related to legal requirements or funding, but the way you demonstrate impact or support decisions is mostly up to you. These lists can quickly get out of control if we don’t differentiate between “This would be so helpful” and “This is necessary”. So here’s a tip for evaluating these internal needs: Internal needs are always actionable.
What does actionable mean? If a metric or report changes, you know how to react. For necessary reports, that reaction will usually have some urgency and a predetermined process/procedure. If a report doesn’t require that level of reaction, it is probably not a need. Remember to ask around – your financial, clinical, or development staff have different views on what is actionable.
Feeling overwhelmed?
Your list is probably too long to tackle in one batch. That’s fine. In fact, that’s normal. We’ll narrow it down some more in a bit. For now, think of this like new employee on-boarding. It’s always overwhelming and you’re probably learning a few things you’ll never need to know, but most of this is very helpful, even if you don’t remember all the details the first time through.
Mapping Flows
So now you have a list of needed reports. The next step is identifying the data needed for those reports. What we want to find is key groups of data that are needed over and over and over again in your essential reports. Almost certainly this list will include:
- Data used in financial reports (income, expenses, account balances)
- Basic patient demographics and counts
- Basic encounter counts (probably categorized by a type)
It may be helpful for you to identify specific pieces of data (e.g., break out patient demographics into race, ethnicity, gender…) or you may decide to leave the specifics to people who oversee that area. Either way (or better yet, do them both) is perfectly fine!
For each of these data groups, map how the data flows. Create an actual physical or digital document for this, don’t just store it in your head. Two processes are outlined below. The informal process is great for leaders that are just trying this out or prefer to manage change in small increments. The formal process is great if you’re ready to dive in.
Informal Process
This framework is borrowed from a book called Assembling Tomorrow.
Describe each step of the flow from start (data collection) to finish (needed reports) in terms of the purpose, parts, place, and pace. Here are some questions to get you started:
- Purpose:
- What does the clinic gain from these reports?
- What do our patients gain?
- Who else could this information benefit?
- Why are we currently collecting this data?
- Was our process for collecting this data created with this purpose in mind?
- Parts (and people):
- Who collects this data?
- Is special equipment used for collecting?
- Are the people collecting the same people that are entering? Or are there intermediate steps?
- Any auditing process for this data? Quality checks?
- Who will be building these reports?
- Who will be viewing these reports or making decisions using them?
- Who can check these reports for accuracy?
- Place:
- Where is the data entered in the system?
- Where is the data stored?
- Where do we want to go to access the reports?
- Are there more convenient storage locations that meet the security requirements of this data?
- Pace:
- How often will these reports be viewed?
- How old can the information be when the report is viewed?
- How often is the data entered?
- How often are any audits or quality checks completed?
Formal Process
BPMN is a set of symbols and rules to help businesses document processes very clearly and precisely. Adoption in healthcare has been a bit slow, but is growing. Mapping processes this way will take extra time, but you’ll be able to use this map for a variety of other improvements: automating process steps, defining process improvement projects/metrics, or working with consultants. Here’s a guide for getting started with BPMN (though by no means is this exhaustive).
Now look at your maps and pick one to tackle first.
I see you, fellow overachiever… one. More than zero and less than two. Commit to seeing this one through and not changing course. You’ll learn more with a focused sprint.
If this is your first go round, pick based on your management style. Consensus and/or hands-off leader? Pick a map where the people involved are mostly on the same page so you can all learn about the tech/data together. Motivator or recovering micro-manager? Go for the biggest impact on reporting to fuel your Go Team! locker-room speeches.
Related Resources to Explore
Making Decisions with Data
A great article from Northwestern University on different philosophies. It’s never too early to start thinking about how you (and how you think other leaders at your clinic) will incorporate data into your decision making. Chances are you’ll all have different tendencies and strengths.
Understanding Where You Are Now
An assessment from the Data Literacy Project. It’s not designed for charitable healthcare clinics, but it will help you get a feel for where you (or your clinic) are now.
Building Effective Analytics
From MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Some of these are heavy on the tech-speak, but the key takeaway here is a theme you’ll see over and over again with reporting: keep your analytics close to your actual operations. It’s good to explore and learn with data, but we don’t want to use resources on projects that aren’t practical!
