Maven Hospital Challenge: Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Report

The Brief

As an Analytics Consultant for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the executive team tasked me with creating a comprehensive KPI dashboard for hospital stakeholders. The primary goal of this dashboard is to provide visibility into the hospital's performance, enabling stakeholders to analyze data across the entire dataset or specific years using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and clear visuals. This allows for the highlighting and understanding of insight into patient admissions, stay durations, hospital revenue, and the impact of insurance on patient costs."

Data Details

The subset of data I was provided spans from January 2011 to February 2022. The dataset includes detailed information about patients, their hospital encounters, the procedures involved in each encounter, and the insurance companies covering each patient. This rich dataset, with its granular details on hospital procedures and patient information, enabled the extraction of clear and actionable insights.

Data Insights

Patient Admissions

The executive team emphasised the need for insights on both patient admissions and readmissions. Almost 45% of all admissions occur via ambulance, a significantly high figure, nearly six times the number of patients admitted for emergency or wellness care. This suggests the hospital needs to improve its appeal as a first choice for care. This is further supported by the high readmission rate of just over 78% over the ten-year span.

Hospital Duration

Due to data limitations, the hospital duration was calculated using the "start" and "end" data for each encounter or procedure. The average time spent in the hospital was found to be 7.27 hours. While the dashboard shows a drastically high average admission time for 36-50 year olds, this is skewed by a 2014 anomaly where this age group had over 200 average hours admitted. Pre-COVID, the 66-80 year olds had a maximum average of only 5.27 hours, while post-COVID, the 21-35 year olds had the highest average admission time.

Revenue

Being blunt, the hospital made $101 million over ten years from this subset of patients, averaging $10 million per year and $3,640 per admission. Improving the appeal of the hospital for care would naturally increase the number of patients choosing this hospital for medical treatment, there for increasing revenue.

Insurance

Only 30% of the hospital’s revenue comes from insurance payouts, which aligns with the high level of ambulance admissions. However, nearly 70% of procedures are covered by insurance, indicating that the issue is not with patient insurance coverage but rather with the highest paying patients not being insured. It may be beneficial to reach out to patients and inform them of potential savings and ability to raise their standard of health by having insurance coverage.

Conclusion

The insights from the dashboard have highlighted critical areas for improvement at Massachusetts General Hospital, such as reducing readmission rates, attracting more primary care patients, and addressing anomalies in patient insurance coverage. To drive better outcomes, I recommend critically evaluating the patient experience across all procedures, possibly including patient surveys, to make the hospital a preferred choice. Additionally, increasing insurance awareness will boost revenue from insured patients. Implementing these strategies will improve patient care, operational efficiency, and financial performance.