How Technology Can Help With Hospital Reports

The finances and operations of the healthcare industry are complicated. That makes it hard for hospitals to report on what they’re doing and how well they’re doing it, especially with no handbook to guide the way. This article walks through the basics of hospital reporting and how to manage it.

What is hospital reporting?

There is no set definition or prescribed format for hospital reporting, but every facility must do it in one manner or another. The reason is the wide variety of services hospitals and clinics provide. A hospital with a large oncology ward located within a busy city will have vastly different data and reports than a walk-in clinic in a quiet suburban area. With no mandatory requirements, each healthcare facility chooses for itself what’s most important to track, measure, and present to its board and leadership team.

Still, hospital reports should always serve the goal of surfacing information that can help the facility provide the best healthcare possible. To be effective and strategic, reports should focus on data sets and trends (versus individual patient records), be suitable for an audience of senior-level stakeholders, and come out quarterly or annually. In other words, hospital reports should present a macro view of how the facility operates over time, not how one patient was cared for on a specific day.

What Hospital Reporting Looks Like (In Theory)

Best practice is for hospital reporting to focus on the health of the overall “business,” not the health of an individual patient. Measuring and reporting on the people, resources, and operations that run a healthcare system is the most effective way to determine if patients are getting a high quality of care.

In general, hospital reports should include summary information (such as dashboards) and analysis on:

• Departments (including treatment types)
• Staff (surgeons, nurses, administrators, etc.)
• Medical equipment usage
• Facility operations
• Budgets

How a specific report is organized varies by facility. Most reports tend to present data for the entire healthcare network, as well as a breakdown by location (if applicable) and department. A hospital financial report, for example, could contain three versions that show the network-wide, location-specific, and department-specific finances.

Some reports may be state or federally mandated, but this varies and legislation is still evolving. Each hospital is responsible for determining which reports are required and providing them as needed.

‍A hospital is a complex organization that generates more information than you can possibly report on. Since you can’t monitor and review everything, decide what to prioritize. That could mean generating reports on hospital admissions, finances, business performance, community health trends, and more. The only way to track the massive amount of data that flows through hospitals, and then use it to make strategic decisions, is with technology.

An Example Of Hospital Reporting With Technology

Using a strategic reporting platform, hospitals can automatically track, measure, and report on whatever healthcare metrics they’ve determined to be priorities. For example, one large hospital uses software to aggregate and roll up data from individual and operational levels to the overall organization level. The data owners at each level track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and strategic projects within the technology platform, generating a score that’s then averaged and aggregated with the next level “up,” eventually generating an overall hospital report card.

Administration Score + Department Score + Healthcare Provider Score = Clinic Overall Score

For example, the administration department may have 20 key measures it reports on; the department averages its performance across these measures to create an overall department score. This is similar to asking “What percent are we to being 100% green on our scorecard?” Maybe the score is 84.5, meaning the department averages 84.5 out of 100 across all of its measures. The administrative units (including other shared services) and all departments have scores that then either add up or average to an overall clinic score.

Using software, the hospital can also make the information presented in its reports interactive. Leadership teams viewing the reports can click a data point, for example a KPI such as staff-to-patient ratio or number of patients served per month, to drill down for more details on how it was measured and why the score appears as it does. This includes both quantitative and qualitative details, which gives leadership more context for strategic decisions.

The benefit of technology, for this hospital and for yours, is that all data from across the organization sits in one system and can be aligned with the larger business strategies. From there, it’s easy to generate consistent, accurate, timely reports.

ClearPoint can help with your hospital reports.

ClearPoint is a strategy management system with robust reporting tools. Our software is designed to help organizations like healthcare facilities build, manage, execute, and report on their strategic plans. That includes everything in this article, from tracking KPIs to generating overall report cards and analysis.

Some of ClearPoint’s top features for hospital reporting include:

• Customizable templates and layouts
• Data visualizations (dashboards, charts, and more)
• Automatic data uploads, calculations, and aggregation
• At-a-glance status indicators
• Interactive, clickable formats
• Ability to combine both quantitative and qualitative information

To learn how ClearPoint can help you manage records or reports in your hospital, contact us. For ideas on what to track, see these examples of quality improvement in healthcare.