Creative Health Labs

This is another really cool way to connect data sources to Tableau.

  From the article: http://www.aha-solutions.org/newsletter/v2-i4/feature.shtml  “If you can’t bill in a clean, simple way, it makes your entire organization look dysfunctional,” says Alex Mohseni, MD, FACEP, chief innovation officer at Emergency Medicine Associates, which manages emergency departments in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding region. “I think hospitals underestimate how important billing is as a patient touch point. No other industry is still doing billing in the outdated fashion that most health care organizations are doing it. Any unnecessary friction in the payment process will lead to lost revenue.” Mohseni’s very title — chief innovation officer — is another example of the changes organizations are making in response to consumer-driven care. The C-suite is being redefined as hospitals create positions like chief innovation officer and chief experience officer.  

Emergency Medicine jobs for physicians My good friend (Puneet Chopra) and I just launched Jobmap.io - an interactive map with Emergency Medicine jobs , listing every hospital in the United States. We've taken a different approach to the job search process. It turns out that most groups are always hiring, or at minimum always wanting to receive more CVs. In fact, there is so much constant flux in Emergency Medicine, that there is no way a recruiter can update a bunch of different ads on different job boards constantly. It's just too fragmented. We realized that what Emergency Medicine needs as a specialty is a single site where every hospital is listed and physicians can easily connect with the recruiter for that site. Additionally, it would be very helpful to have data filters and points to help physicians decide their career options. Here's some of the data points we've added and why: Door-to-doctor - We think this is a good measure of the overall function...

I found a very interesting dataset  (update May 2016: it looks like this dataset has disappeared from data.gov... very fishy!) showing the number of hospital installs each major EMR/EHR has since 2011. I put the data into a simple chart: It is interesting that in the last 12 months almost all of the EHRs' growth has plateaued except for Epic and Cerner: But to see what is REALLY going on, take a look at another angle on the same data. Of the 135 additional hospital installs of EHRs (going to the top 6 vendors) in 2014 , EPIC got a whopping 68% of new hospital installs, according to the same public data set: Given the many articles on user interface and integration problems with EPIC, this is a scary trend: 1. Why do users dislike Epic so much. 2.  Stockholm syndrome and Epic’s takeover of medical records 3. Why EMR companies don't care about usability 4. Bad EMRs 5. “On a really good day, you might call the system mediocre, but most of the time it’s lousy,” ...

I put together an interactive map with data tables showing nursing home quality data from Nursing Home Compare . The table is specifically the Nursing Home Deficiencies table, which tabulates deficiencies in safety, fire safety, and health. Learn About Tableau In the above interactive map, you can search for nursing homes by adjusting the filters on the right side. The filters include state, number of deficiencies, general type of deficiencies (they are generally categorized into fire safety and health), and "scope severity code", which is well defined on the following website:  http://www.in.gov/isdh/reports/QAMIS/ltccr/matrlink.htm . There is a good report on the completeness and accuracy of Nursing Home Compare data from the OIG on this site:  http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-01-03-00130.pdf . Here are the typical types of nursing home deficiencies cited: Allow residents to easily view the results of the nursing home's most recent inspection. Reasonably...

In this post I'm going to show a step-by-step way to create your own data visualization map using *live* Hospital Compare data  . By "live" data I mean that the data visualization we create will update automatically when CMS updates its data set; we will not have to download the new data, rather we will build the connection between Tableau and the public data available on CMS' web site. Here is an example of the end product we will build: Learn About Tableau Just to summarize what the above map shows: Each hospital is represented as a circle on a map, color coded by its score on one of the questions from the HCAHPS survey. The user can click on the filters on the right and move the map to look at other state's hospitals, and switch which HCAHPS question he is interested in. What's *REALLY* cool though, is that this data is not static. When CMS updates the hospital scores, our map will update automatically. To build the above: First, download the...

I just put this map together, essentially a mashup of assisted living facilities and hospital quality data from HCAHPS. I first published this on Seniorbility  (a senior cognitive monitoring and safety service), and I am republishing it here to make it more widely available. I was browsing around Assisted Living websites and found the search process to be pretty deplorable. Obviously, this map is just a first step. If anybody has access to a national database of senior housing facilities with addresses, phone numbers, and/or websites, please let me know! (Direct message me @amohseni or put a comment on this post).

I did a random vanity search on Google today, searching for "alex mohseni", and noticed something unusual in the search results: I knew that, in fact, I had a "4/5" rating on Healthgrades, *not* a "5/5" rating as it was showing me. I'll explain the absurdity of these sort of random online scoring systems for physicians on another post. For now, I was curious to know why the stars were showing 5/5, instead of 4/5. I clicked on the link, and sure enough, my aggregate score was 4/5, not 5/5. I then noticed that I had done my search while logged in to Google. I logged out of Google and performed the same exact search, and here's what the Healthgrades result looked like: Note that there are now 4/5 stars, not 5/5 stars, the only difference being that I signed out of Google. So, Healthgrades (or Google?) was actively manipulating the stars to look very favorable when it knew that a physician was looking him/herself up.  Why would Healthgrade...

With the near-record cold temperatures today, I was asked by Fox News to talk about the signs, symptoms and treatment of hypothermia and frostbite. Here's the video:

Many emergency rooms across the country may be sensing that their patient volumes are not as high as anticipated. This is a big issue for many emergency departments because staffing levels have to match expected patient volumes for financial reasons (overstaffed EDs will lose a lot of money and be unsustainable). It is very interesting to me that Google web searches by people for the terms "ER" and "Urgent Care" reflect what is happening in the market: more and more patients are searching for urgent care facilities for their unscheduled care instead of ERs. Here is a graph I created using Google Trends to show this trend:

The positive correlation between hospital costs and quality was debunked long ago, nonetheless it's still interesting to look at the data in new ways. Here I've combined two different data sets: first I took the hospital charge data that was published earlier this year  by CMS and compared it against patient satisfaction or "perception" data from HCAHPS: Learn About Tableau Let me explain the graph. Each circle represents an individual hospital. The x-axis represents patient satisfaction as measured by the HCAHPS question representing the percentage of patients giving their inpatient visit a score of a "9" or a "10." The y-axis represents the average charge (the amount the hospital billed Medicare, not necessarily the amount the hospital actually got paid) by the hospital for management of sepsis, which I am using as a surrogate measure for hospital charges overall. I chose sepsis because it is a common medical syndrome for which we have lots of...

Here are the twenty hospitals in America with the lowest recommendation rates by patients whom they serve, according to data from the official HCAHPS survey , accessed October 2013 from the Medicare data website : Learn About Tableau What is "HCAHPS"? HCAHPS is best explained by their own fact sheet : The HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Survey is the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital care... While many hospitals have collected information on patient satisfaction for their own internal use, until HCAHPS there were no common metrics and no national standards for collecting and publicly reporting information about patient experience of care. Since 2008, HCAHPS has allowed valid comparisons to be made across hospitals locally, regionally and nationally.  Why is HCAHPS important? The answer is "money". Again, from the fact sheet: HCAHPS and Hospital ...