Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters:
Advancing Pediatric Care With A Data Culture Shift

Connecting Disparate Data: Analytics Success

Key takeaways

Background

Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters (CHKD) is a 206-bed, freestanding children’s hospital located in Norfolk, Virginia.

CHKD was established in 1961 and has more than 3,000 employees. There are about 5,000 admissions to the hospital every year, including neonatal and pediatric intensive care, rehabilitation, and surgical services. The hospital also has a medical group with more than 100 primary care pediatricians handling about 400,000 visits a year. In 2022, the hospital opened the 14-story Children’s Pavilion, a new pediatric mental health hospital, and outpatient center.

The challenge

In 2019, CHKD recognized it needed a more robust plan to better integrate its data and ensure trust.

The organization has three separate hospital systems that house patient data: Allscripts for in-patient revenue cycle data; Epic for ambulatory scheduling and revenue cycle data; and Cerner for the hospital’s EHR. This made it difficult for employees to run reports in which they needed data from different systems.

Typically, employees would run reports out of the three separate systems and then combine them into an Excel spreadsheet. It was difficult to ensure that the data coming out was the same from system to system, raising questions about data integrity. This method also proved to be tedious. The hospital wanted to find a better way to combine and standardize its data, both reducing time and improving decision-making among staff and executives.

The solution

CHKD came to Dimensional Insight through a recommendation from an analyst firm. Mary Jane Darling, Director of Data Analytics at CHKD, said Dimensional Insight’s track record of success at other leading hospitals and health systems played a role in their selection.

With Dimensional Insight, CHKD has brought together data from all three hospital systems and has combined it into one data store for simplified analysis. One specific problem that CHKD had was that the different data systems had different standards for patient identification. This meant it was difficult to determine instances of the same patient across the board. Now, after Dimensional Insight integrated the data, CHKD can look at a longitudinal record of patients with ease.
“We’re dealing with large volumes of data, but now that Dimensional Insight has helped combine it, we’re able to run queries against that data store very quickly,” says Phil Watson, Data Analyst and Development Specialist at CHKD.

Darling and Watson say they have been working to identify data stewards in various domain areas at the hospital. These data stewards have been working with the analyst team and Dimensional Insight to identify the most important data measures that the hospital uses and ensure consistent definitions across departments. If definitions or workflows change, those stewards can help govern the data. In addition, these stewards can help answer questions from others on their teams, helping to increase data literacy throughout the organization.

The results

Through Dimensional Insight, CHKD executives have been accessing data such as ED visits and admits, charges, payments, and physician scorecards, and using that data to improve the way they make decisions.

“Decision-makers are grateful to get their hands on data that they didn’t have before,” says Darling. “It’s accessibility. And it’s standardization. So many people had pockets of data and now they can see the big picture. It’s been a data culture shift.”

For CHKD, the work that has been done with Dimensional Insight so far is just the start. The organization is currently deploying the Emergency Department Advisor application and is planning to deploy Dimensional Insight applications for ambulatory data and surgery operations in the near future.

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