TRANSFORMING BUSINESS

WITH ANALYTICS
1-Day Course Exercises

INSTRUCTIONS
During this course, you and your team will have the opportunity to complete 5 exercises that
focus on putting course concepts into practice. These exercises are based on a fictional
business scenario, and each exercise is designed to be completed within 10 minutes. At the
end of each exercise, you will be asked to share your results with the other teams.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not “read ahead” in these exercises unless directed to specific pages.

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

GENERAL CASE BACKGROUND

You are a consultant working for a family medical practice called Greentower Family Center
(GFC). The practice has three clinic locations located in BBQ City, NC. As a family medical
practice, GFC is the first place their patients go for routine health care needs (“primary care”)
– annual physicals, prescriptions, etc. For more advanced care needs, GFC is owned by a
local hospital, Tower Regional Medical Center (TRMC), which includes a series of specialty
clinics (e.g., OB/GYN, orthopedics, etc.).

GFC is considering buying an existing third clinic in a rural area of the state. As a consultant,
your job is to help leadership answer key business questions related to this investment.

Your stakeholders for this engagement are:

Mark Lewis, CPA Mallory Owens, MHA

Chief Financial Officer Manager of Patient Outreach Services
Responsible for ensuring investment Responsible for a team of care managers
viability and future profitability helping patients get the care they need

Phillip Rhoades Dr. Alicia Spencer

Chief Marketing Officer Chief Physician Officer
Responsible for customer Responsible for all clinical services
engagement and marketing programs and clinical staff at all clinics

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

EXERCISE 1
OPPORTUNITY FRAMING
Situation
Mark Lewis, the CFO, comes to you and says:

“Dr. Spencer and the board are considering buying an existing primary care
clinic over in Yonder County, NC in order to expand our service area. I’d like to
see some analytics that clarify the business impact for this potential acquisition /
expansion. We need to be confident in our decision about this, both financially
and operationally. Please work with Dr. Spencer and Phillip Rhoades to develop
the analysis and prepare the communications in anticipation of a presentation
to the board and leadership team.”

He asks the CIO to make some data sets available to you that include data from the existing
GFC clinics as well as the potential acquisition clinic and its patients. These combined data
sets are outlined on page 11.

Approach
1. What does “good” possibly look like from Mark’s perspective? Where would you
expect his “5 whys” to lead?

2. What elements in the data set on page 11 are likely important from Mark’s
perspective?

3. What challenges do you see in answering his questions?

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

EXERCISE 2
STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT
Situation
Mark Lewis provides you a copy of the organization’s current strategy (see page 10).

You set up meetings with Dr. Spencer and Phillip Rhoades in order to further refine your
opportunity frame. In meeting with Dr. Spencer, she shares the following information:

“Our growth strategy is not just about growing our geographic coverage. It’s
also about meeting patients where they are in life. In order to meaningfully
change the health outcomes of many patients in our state, we must be better
connected to local charitable resources that can help patients in need get
medications, address housing concerns, and other social issues. Those drive
each patient’s overall trajectory of health and the community health burden.”

In meeting with Phillip Rhoades, he adds:

“It’s about trying to remove the barriers to patients getting care and increasing
the engagement around the care they are receiving. We want healthier
patients, and we want our publicly reported quality measures to reflect the
healthier outcomes we can achieve with our patients. For example, when
patients live more than a few miles from their primary care doctor, we know
they tend to avoid getting the care they need. If we increase availability, we
hopefully increase engagement, service utilization and improve health.”

Approach
1. Discuss how these pieces of strategic information inform your analytical strategy.

2. What potential conflicts does this project represent against strategic goals, and how
might analytics of the right data address them?

3. What does the organizational strategy imply about data that needs to become a
strategic asset?

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

EXERCISE 3
FINANCIAL INSIGHTS
Situation
You meet with Mark Lewis to discuss some of the financial aspects of the project. He
indicates that one of his main concerns as the following:

“Patients in Yonder County do not have as many resources as some other areas
we serve. We will need to rely more on patient outreach services provided by
Mallory Owens’ team to make this work, but it’s unclear what that means
operationally from a cost perspective. The clinical profile of these patient
populations and their associated costs will be important to understand if this
investment will work.”

You take these questions to Dr. Spencer who confirms that Mallory Owens’ outreach services
will be important. When you mention that you have access to the diagnoses in your data set,
and you are considering how to define costs by those diagnoses, she shares:

“There are 3 different places in the electronic medical record systems that
uniquely store a patient’s diagnoses. Clinicians are inconsistent in where they
capture diagnoses, and there is no clear standard for which location(s) are kept
up to date. Only one of the 3 areas has associated cost and revenue data.”

Approach
1. How does the additional information provided by Mark influence your plan in terms
of his original ask? How is the analysis potentially different?

2. How does the additional information provided by Dr. Spender influence your plan?
What additional work is needed in order to conduct the analysis effectively?

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

EXERCISE 4
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
Situation
You meet with Mallory Owens to discuss your project. To your surprise, Mallory is resistant to
some of the ideas being pursued. As you work through the “5 whys” process with her, she
provides the following feedback:

“I love the idea of engaging more directly with patients. But you are assuming
that if we knew what additional people to contact, we would contact them. The
problem is that we already have more people to engage than we have staff with
capacity to do the work. Giving my people a longer list is not helpful when they
can’t finish the list they already have. Also, we don’t just look at diagnosis when
developing our patient engagement plans – we look at a lot of factors, though it
is hard to consider them all at the same time.”

Approach
1. What analytical and data opportunities does Mallory’s feedback uncover that could be
the topic of the next iteration of your lifecycle / opportunity frame?

2. Discuss the various types of insights Mallory’s team likely needs in order to be
effective, and whether those insights are descriptive or predictive?

3. Debate the idea of building a dashboard for Mallory, and what other opportunities
might exist.

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

ANALYSIS RESULTS
Stakeholder Example Question Topics Analytical Results
Chief • Business / financial In the proposed acquisition, GFC would
Financial impact of proposed add 3,000-3,500 patients across the
Officer acquisition existing practice’s patient roster, new
• Cost management of new patients attracted to the GFC brand, and
patient population existing GFC patients that don’t regularly
get services because the distance is too far.
The acquisition would pay for itself within 4
years, but does require increased
utilization of patient outreach. Estimated
incremental costs would be $210,000 / yr.
Chief • Improving health These patients are at higher risk for
Physician outcomes for at-risk diseases such as cardiovascular disease
Officer patients by ensuring and diabetes. Existing community
community resource resources will need to be engaged by
availability patient outreach services for approximately
19% of the patient population.
Chief • Increasing patient Lowering care access barriers will likely
Marketing engagement by lowering positively impact 900-1300 patients each
Officer access barriers year. However, these patients are sicker
• Improving publicly- than existing GFC patients and are
reported quality generally unmanaged, posing a risk to
measures publicly reported quality measures.
Increased utilization of outreach services
will be important to get the best outcomes
and avoid drops in quality performance.
Manager of • Improving resource A predictive model was built that prioritizes
Patient allocation decisions given patients for outreach services based on the
Outreach limited care management patient’s projected clinical risk. And a new
resources visualization tool helps leaders interactively
explore patterns in the patients that they
serve during annual planning.

The estimated payback period for the analytical investments is less than a year, generating
approximately $600K in value each year between avoidable utilization, avoided penalties
related to quality, and increased capacity.

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

EXERCISE 5
COMMUNICATION & INTERPRETATION
Situation
Review the analysis findings on the previous page. Then, review the Communication Plan
template on the next page and consider how you might use that messaging template in
answering these questions.

Approach
1. How might you adjust your messaging to each target audience for this message?
What are their communication and information needs and preferences?

Dr. Alicia Spencer Mark Lewis, CPA Mallory Owens’ team

2. How would you describe the message in one sentence to Dr. Alicia Spencer?

3. Why was it important to not just provide Mark Lewis his messaging, but also create
value for Mallory Owens’ team through some new analytical capabilities?

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COMMUNICATION PLAN
HEADLINE Provide one-sentence that summarizes the initiative and its findings

EXAMPLE: Our emergency department can treat 17 additional patients daily with higher customer satisfaction if we add 2 nurses to second shift.

MESSAGE ELEMENTS
Message
Emergency department
demand exceeds capacity.
Bottlenecks occur in 2nd shift
nurse utilization with
behavioral health patients
Adding 2 nurses during peak
demand would allow
dedicated capacity for
behavioral patient
management
Describe up to three 1-sentence messages that describe the main insights from the initiative
Evidence
Second shift bed utilization
averages >98% for the past 9
months.
Behavioral health patients account
for 63% of all ED delays.
Two nurse FTEs would alleviate
79% of case backlogs.
Our lowest customer satisfaction
score is related to throughput
Potential Objections
Doesn’t this vary by
season and day of week?
Couldn’t the delays be
related to physician
capacity?
Wouldn’t we just shift the
bottleneck to psychiatric
consult time?
Objection Responses
Yes, but in no scenario does
average daily utilization drop
below 95%
We looked at that issue and did
not find a relationship.
That is possible, though
physician utilization data does
not show that risk presently.
Future Work
Assess factors that
produce utilization
spikes
none
Build a simulation
model that includes
consult turnaround
time.

ANALYTICS PROFILE Describe the data, the domain attributes within the data, and the analytical methods for the initiative
Data Profiling Domain Profiling Methods Summary
~24,000 patient encounters in the ED over the Cohort included all patient types Correlations across 29 factors
past 12 months. We did not include patient transfers Simulation of throughput using patient and nurse
Data pulled from medical records system All 3 hospital shifts were included entities
Staffing data pulled from time entry ED delays were defined as any non-monitoring
delay > 2.5 hours.

STORY PROFILE Describe the six main elements of the story you are telling with this initiative
Who What When Where How Why
More emergency get treated faster and during hospital visits within the emergency when we balance because nurse capacity
department patients have higher satisfaction department demand and capacity drives ED throughput.
of nurses

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TOWER REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER STRATEGY

Financial
Goal 1 Deliver sustainable financial performance that meets our targets

Goal 2 Grow the risk-delegated (value-oriented) proportion of our business

Goal 3 Increase the accessibility of our services to patients within the state

Customer
Goal 1 Improve patient outcomes through collaborative, high quality care

Goal 2 Develop deeper engagement with our patients and their families

Goal 3 Expand our regional leadership on publicly reported quality measures

Internal
Goal 1 Develop new online patient experiences that provide more comprehensive
access to the services we provide.

Goal 2 Reduce the variability in care practices across the patient communities we
serve

Learning and Growth

Goal 1 Deepen our culture of respect and inclusiveness that attracts the best talent
and inspires everyone towards excellence

Goal 2 Reduce clinician burden and burnout, improving professional satisfaction

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TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ANALYTICS
Course Exercises

DATA DICTIONARY
For purposes of this exercise, you can assume that GFC has the following data sets available
to your data scientists, and that the data is reasonably appropriate for the tasks at hand.

Medical Data Set Customer Data Set Geographic Data

• Patient Name • • Customer Name • • Zip Codes
• Age • Zip code • Census counts by
• Gender • Amount billed zip code
• Diagnoses • Amount outstanding • Average per
• Medications • Insurer Name capita earnings
• Last Visit Date • Insurer Plan by county
• Count of primary care • Count of emails sent • Estimated per
visits over prior 3 years • Count of website visits capita health
• Count of current year- • Disease management burden ($ / year)
to-date visits program participation by county
• Number of • Measure of
hospitalizations over average primary
the prior 3 year care clinic density
by zip code

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