Mayo Clinic leverages analytics to reduce test overutilization

To assist its providers know what laboratory tests to order and when, the Mayo Clinic is utilizing analytics to decrease the test overutilization and unnecessary healthcare charges.

Inefficient clinical laboratory test utilization cannot merely increase costs but can negatively affect the patient safety and quality of care, in accordance to Daniel Boettcher, senior programmer and analyst at the Mayo Clinic’s laboratory in Rochester, Minnesota.

Although, the Mayo Clinic has embraced clinical laboratory test utilization management to trace provider ordering patterns to recognize areas where performance can be improved and to stop providers from ordering tests that do not benefit patient outcomes.

That is where analytics come into play—assisting to decrease the unnecessary testing and improve utilization management by suggesting approaches for diagnoses of particular diseases, guiding selection of the correct tests, and helping in the treatment and monitoring of patient care.

“Over the last 4 years or so, we have been working to transform the way we give analytics services to the laboratories here,” claims Boettcher.

Instead of building a laboratory-focused analytics platform in-house, the Mayo Clinic decided to partner with an outside vendor, due to the work demands that such a project would place on its in-house IT team of analysts, developers and programmers, as well as the complications engaged in such a project. Mayo Medical Laboratories and Mayo’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology (DLMP), one of the world’s greatest clinical laboratories conducting more than 27 million tests yearly, opted healthcare analytics company Viewics to serve as their analytics platform.

Among other capabilities, the Viewics Utilization Management solution observes physician peer-to-peer test ordering patterns; offers peer-to-peer utilization reports to physicians; and recognizes the most costly tests and those providers with the highest send-out rates.

“With self-service reporting, we’re really putting the data in the hands of the users,” analyzes Boettcher. “They have straight access to it. Nobody is in their way.”

Additionally, the software assists to manage laboratory test utilization problem areas, like removing clinically obsolete tests, decreasing clinically duplicative testing, and identifying and changing tests with confusing or similar codes.

For those hospitals and health systems searching to implement and use analytics to drive organizational initiatives, Boettcher asserts that developing an analytics-driven culture is critical in which the data flowing into an agency is transformed into information that can be used to make actionable decisions.

Boettcher points out that “getting information into the system requires being managed just as carefully—if not more carefully—than getting information out of the system.” He makes the case that “if we do not get good quality information put into the system, we cannot get good quality information out of the system.”

“At the Mayo Clinic, it meant taking a strategic approach to developing a culture of analytics,” he summarizes, adding that it is about “ingraining into the laboratory staff and their procedures the value of analytics so that it is part of their everyday, regular workflow and operations.”