The Care Principle: Examining Care Transition in the Pre-Pandemic vs the Pandemic Period

Challenge Objective

For this**** challenge, I took on the role of a Data Analyst for the American Hospital Association (AHA).

As part of your role, my task is to analyze the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey results for the last 9 years. The intent of the HCAHPS initiative is to provide a standardized survey instrument for measuring patients’ perspectives on hospital care, and one of its 3 main goals is to "create incentives for hospitals to improve their quality of care".

The task is to evaluate whether the HCAHPS survey has been successful in accomplishing this goal by answering questions like these:

• Have hospitals' HCAHPS scores improved over the past 9 years?
• Are there any specific areas where hospitals have made more progress than others?
• Are there any major areas of opportunity remaining?
• What recommendations can you make to hospitals to help them further improve the patient experience?

Steps:

I chose Power BI to help with data cleaning, as with Power BI, you can easily normalize your data and create a data model without having to use multiple joins.

I loaded each .csv file into Power BI and in this case, I didn't have to do too many transformations. The most I had to do was extract a year column from the state_results.csv file.

I created measures to help calculate the average scores for the pre-pandemic, pandemic, and entire timeframe in the data.

Insights:

• Hospitals have an opportunity to improve patient care by being more considerate of their patients' views: Despite the millions of patients who participated in the study, care transition improved by less than 2% in the period before the pandemic.

• Hospitals need to focus on care transition: Typically when patients are discharged from the hospital, they are left to fend for themselves. Effective care transition communication can improve patient outcomes, reduce readmissions, and enhance patient and family satisfaction.

• What are North and South Dakota doing right? Care transition improved comparatively significantly in the two states during the pandemic. There is an opportunity for hospitals to benchmark using hospitals in those two states.