Improve Clinical Outcomes Based on Orthopaedic Data Variations with Embedded Analytics

Introduction

Many orthopaedic departments in hospitals struggle with the rising costs of healthcare products and the satisfaction of their patients. Sufficiently resourced hospitals will place a high priority on data analytics to address these struggles. Adopting an embedded analytics solution lets a hospital track key metrics within its own apps, which will help it collect data, analyze that data, and make better decisions about the orthopaedic department’s future.

In this blog post, I will give you an overview of embedded analytics in an orthopaedic department and how it can enhance the department’s performance through the following topics:

• What is embedded analytics?
• Benefits of embedding the Bold BI Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard.
• Bold BI’s Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard.
• How to embed analytical tools into healthcare-domain apps.

What is embedded analytics?

Embedded analytics is the integration of analytics and data visualization into a software application to track key metrics, gain insight into them, and provide an easily comprehensible representation of them. Bold BI helps you operate a complete analytics platform within your everyday work applications and minimizes dependency on the IT team.

Benefits of embedding the Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard

Embedding the Bold BI Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard makes work easier for orthopedists by giving them the insight needed to achieve departmental goals. Benefits of embedding the dashboard include:

• Create awareness of variables that impact the orthopaedic department
• Track and improve daily hospital operations
• Improve the quality of services
• Handle medical reports proper

Create awareness of variables that impact the orthopaedic department

Embedded analytics helps clinicians track key metrics such as patient wait time, patient safety, patient population by urgency, and more. These metrics help clinicians keep up with patient data like the number of visits and the services received at each one. They also help the clinicians detect an increase or decrease in the average number of patients over time. Other metrics help clinicians identify common conditions and inform the necessary authority to reduce the incidence of such conditions. These data points can be used as a tool to improve patient health and increase their satisfaction with services received.

Track and improve daily hospital operations

Embedding the Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard helps orthopaedic surgeons track and improve daily operations using key metrics such as operations per month, admissions and readmissions by diagnosis-related groups, total patients discharged, and average potential bed day savings. Monitoring these metrics ensures that daily operations are effectively managed without compromising patient care. This helps optimize operations and increase the productivity of not only the orthopaedic department, but the hospital as a whole.

Improve the quality of services

Embedded analytics helps track KPIs like average length of stay, potential bed day savings, patient follow-up rate, and patient treatments. By tracking these, administrators of the orthopaedic department and the hospital can see and anticipate trends that can reduce the number of inpatient days, which in turn helps decrease risk of infection, improve the quality of treatment, and increase hospital profits with efficient bed management. These stats also help track feedback metrics such as communication between primary care physicians, specialists, and patients; public media mentions; patient feedback; and more. Monitoring feedback helps orthopaedic department administrators identify where they are failing and take actions to improve.

Handle medical reports properly

Reports are useful for measuring task progress. In the context of an orthopaedic clinic, they show the clinic’s periodical success and achievements. Embedded analytics makes tracking key metrics of an orthopaedic clinic through automated data collection and then publishing reports built from that data much easier. Such reports help the clinic’s managers know if they have accomplished their goal and whether they need to improve the clinic’s performance. With embedded analytics, automated report construction and publication is easy to configure.

Bold BI’s Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard

Bold BI’s Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard example shows the daily operations and trends in through important metrics and organizes them by facility and month.

The following metrics and KPIs are visualized in the dashboard:

• Bed occupancy.
• Total deaths.
• Average potential bed day savings.
• Average length of stay.
• Total episodes.
• Total discharged.
• Mortality rate.
• Average complexity.
• Average medical cost by diagnosis-related group (DRG).
• Admissions and readmissions by DRG (diagnosis-related groups)
• Patient population by urgency type.
• Episodes by month.
• DRG by complication.
• Admissions and readmissions by month.
• Patient population by gender.

Bed occupancy

This card widget shows the number of beds occupied by patients for the selected month.

Total deaths

This card widget shows the total number of deaths recorded for the selected month.

Average potential bed day savings

This card widget shows the average potential bed days saved by speeding up the diagnosis process for the selected month.

Average LOS (length of stay)

This card widget shows the average number of days patients spent in the hospital for the selected month.

Total episodes

This card widget shows the total number of medical cases recorded at the facility for the selected month.

Total discharged

This card widget shows the total number of patients released after treatment for the selected month.

Mortality rate

This card widget shows the percentage of deaths across all patients in the hospital for the selected month.

Average complexity

This card widget shows the average proportion of complex patients in the hospital for the selected month.

Average medical costs by DRG (diagnosis-related groups)

This column bar chart contains the average treatment cost per DRG for the selected month.

Admissions and readmissions by DRG (diagnosis-related groups)

This column chart visualized the total number of patients admitted and readmitted by DRG for the selected month.

Patient population by urgency type

This bar graph shows the number of patients who come to the hospital by urgency type for the selected month. This helps the orthopaedic clinicians devise strategies on how to attend to patients.

Episodes by month

This stacked area spline chart breaks down the number of patients diagnosed by their gender and month/year. It gives managers an overview of the patients visiting their facility for the past six months.

DRG (diagnosis-related groups) by complication

This stacked column chart shows the total number of patients with clinical complications by diagnosis-related groups for the selected month. It helps clinicians observe how patients’ conditions are correlated.

Admissions and readmissions by month

This spline chart shows the number of patients admitted and readmitted for the selected month. It provides a clear picture of how the hospital performs in the delivery of its services to patients, and indicates when doctors need to improve their performance.

Patient population by gender

This pie chart shows the patient population by gender for the selected month.

To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Orthopaedic Clinical Variation Dashboard demo.

How to embed analytical tools into orthopaedic clinic apps

Let’s see how analytics and dashboards can be embedded into an orthopaedic clinic’s ASP.NET MVC web application. Consider a scenario where your healthcare facility has a website like the one shown in the following image.

You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard.

Prerequisites:

Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.

Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.

First, create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.

Step 2: Configure embed properties.

After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.

 Step 3: Generate embed secret.

You have to set the embed secret for authentication, and you can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.

Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.

Step 4: Create an authorization server.

You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log in to different applications separately.

Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.

Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference the required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.

Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.

After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.

To learn more about embedding dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.

Conclusion

Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features.

I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help orthopaedic departments in hospitals be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and begin creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.