New Dashboard Helps Hospitals Lower Operating Costs and Improve Quality

Mathematica created a new dashboard that helps hospitals and health systems compare their revenue, expenses, and quality metrics to those of similar hospitals and health systems, regionally and nationwide. The dashboard was created for MaineHealth, a not-for-profit integrated health system serving residents of Maine and New Hampshire.

 “Hospitals strive to stay efficient as their operating costs rise. By providing insights into MaineHealth’s cost efficiency relative to that of peer hospitals, the tool helps the organization identify cost-saving and quality improvement strategies,” said Evelyn Li, senior researcher at Mathematica.

“Mathematica’s expertise and access to complex data sets has given us a tool for our health system that supports our business operations and cost controls in a targeted way, enabling us to maintain our high quality of care,” said Al Swallow, chief financial officer of MaineHealth. “Even as the financial landscape for health systems shifts from fee-for-service to value-based payment arrangements, it’s still important to know and understand our costs for delivering care so we can be even more effective and maximize our resources on behalf of our patients.”

The dashboard Mathematica created for MaineHealth gives hospitals and health systems access to a searchable database that encompasses most community hospitals nationwide—with information on quality measures, costs and charges for the provided services, and performance on Medicare quality measures.

Mathematica, an Amazon Web Services partner, used Amazon QuickSight to build the dashboard. This cloud-based, analytic software-as-a-service application includes client-specific data visualizations and gives users the ability to write their own queries to aid with market intelligence and comparisons.

Mathematica relied on several publicly available data sources to build a database, stored in Amazon S3, that covers hospitals across the United States and contains comprehensive information on hospital characteristics and the demographics of the surrounding area, such as the county where a hospital is located. Mathematica compiled information on revenue, expenses and quality metrics, and hospital characteristics.

About MaineHealth

MaineHealth is a not-for-profit integrated health system whose vision is “working together so our communities are the healthiest in America.” It consists of nine local health systems; a comprehensive behavioral health care network; diagnostic services; home health agencies; and 1,700 employed providers working together through the MaineHealth Medical Group. With about 22,000 employees, MaineHealth provides preventive care, diagnosis, and treatment to 1.1 million residents of Maine and New Hampshire. Learn more at MaineHealth.org.