VHA Inc. Launches First Real-Time Monitoring Application For Hospital Cardiac Programs

IRVING, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VHA Inc., the national health care alliance, is launching its Cardiac Performance Dashboard™, a powerful management tool that enables hospital administrators and clinicians to monitor, manage and forecast their cardiac department's clinical, financial and operational performance in real-time. The cath lab often generates a significant portion of a hospital's cardiology revenue and expenses, so efficient management can be crucial to a hospital's success. More than 2,000 hospitals nationwide have cardiac catheterization labs. In 2007, hospitals spent more than $21.5 billion on interventional cardiology and cardiac rhythm management devices to perform more than 1 million cath lab procedures.

Wide adoption of the VHA Cardiac Performance Dashboard could support national efforts to reduce health care costs and improve quality in an area of health care that touches many families' lives.

The dashboard's large, color-coded dials enable administrators to more rapidly detect and respond to trends and events using current information. Previously, information about interventional cardiology performance was outdated and required lengthy and time-consuming data analysis to uncover. Now, hospital administrators, medical staff and clinicians can immediately apply information about the cost of care, clinical quality measures and patient experience data – up to the last completed procedure – allowing the hospital to rapidly target areas for improvement by the hour.

The Cardiac Performance Dashboard allows hospitals to monitor clinical effectiveness and operational efficiency in the cath lab, electrophysiology lab and cardiac rhythm management departments. It does not track information for cardiac surgery procedures.

"We developed the Dashboard with hospitals and patients in mind," said Joane Goodroe, senior vice president of Innovation at VHA. "It is important because it saves time, reduces costs and rapidly reduces the time required to accurately interpret clinical and cost information. In addition, dashboard users can easily compare their cardiac program's statistics to national best practices, identify areas for improvement and monitor improvement efforts."

The tool enables hospitals to compare their cardiac programs to national benchmarks for comprehensive oversight for 49 parameters, including the following areas:

• Cost per procedure
• Utilization of specific devices
• Turnaround time for cath labs between procedures
• Length of patient stay
• Infection rates
• Procedure results
• Patient profiles to measure severity
• Variation in process and supply usage by physician

Users can immediately identify areas where they can improve clinical outcomes through real-time performance alerts that identify specific factors. For example, the Dashboard would allow users to see their own detailed 24/7 door-to-balloon statistics and identify any time periods that may not meet national performance standards and determine the causes.

"The Cardiac Performance Dashboard helps hospital executives make immediate, well-informed decisions that have a positive impact on the institution and its patients, since much of the detailed information collected relates directly to patient care quality," said Goodroe.

Hospitals can customize the dashboard's metrics to best support their individual decision-making and goals. In addition, results viewed by individual physicians allow hospital staff members to precisely identify opportunities for improvement.

"This innovative dashboard application will give us detailed, current and relevant information that we can use to identify and analyze our department's performance in multiple key areas," said Tom Edwards, Cardiac Services Director at Northeast Georgia Medical Center and Health System in Gainesville, Georgia. "We expect this will help our patients receive better care, lower our department's costs and help our hospital remain competitive."

"The health care industry has been in need of a powerful tool like this for a long time. To run successful cardiac programs, it is imperative to be able to see how many cases are scheduled, the average time per case and whether volumes are up or down in real-time," said Cathy Young, RN, MBA, vice president of cardiac medicine and geriatric services at The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. "We are a technically advanced hospital. Nobody else's technology offered us this critical ability to link leaders to these key areas that are the engine of any heart hospital."

VHA's Cardiac Performance Dashboard relies upon and analyzes vast amounts of information collected by VHA's CathSource ® data warehouse system and must be used in combination with it. CathSource is VHA's proprietary data-gathering tool. It has collected detailed, real-time patient information at the point of care for nearly 3 million patient encounters nationwide.

For a demonstration of the Cardiac Performance Dashboard please visit http://www.vha.com/cardiacperformancedashboard

To learn more about VHA's other important efforts to help hospitals safely and efficiently improve patient care, visit www.vha.com.

About VHA – VHA Inc., based in Irving, Texas, is a national alliance that provides industry-leading supply chain management services and supports the formation of regional and national networks to help members improve their clinical and economic performance. With 16 offices across the U.S., VHA has a track record of proven results in serving more than 1,400 not-for-profit hospitals and more than 23,000 non-acute care organizations nationwide.

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