Podcast Q&A: Dr. Peter Pronovost on Driving Value, and UH’s “Very Different Approach to Innovation”

When most people hear the name Peter Pronovost, they think about checklists, and for good reason. Nearly two decades ago, Dr. Pronovost developed a set of steps to eliminate infections from catheter lines, an innovation that helped save thousands of lives while also transforming the delivery of care. Now, he’s leverage that same approach to improve value.

And although Pronovost still believes checklists are an essential tool in providing quality patient care, what’s just as important — particularly as healthcare shifts to a value-based model — is changing the narrative. Recently, he spoke with healthsystemCIO about the three-part strategy he’s using to drive a new narrative at University Hospitals, where he has served as Chief Clinical Transformation Officer since 2018. He also talked about the data model they’re using to develop a more holistic view of the patient, how his team has leveraged technology to care for patients during the pandemic, why value means much more than just cutting costs, and the three characteristics that are necessary for successfully driving change.

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Key Takeaways



* One of the foundational pieces in University Hospitals’ innovation strategy is the data model that looks at three key areas: patient cohorts, provider outcomes, and utilization.

* By leveraging machine learning – and combining technologies such as chatbots and smart scheduling – UH has created automatic triggers that make it easier for patients to receive care.

* UH has partnered with Agility to provide real-time feedback “on a variety of measures that help hospital throughput and quality,” including asset tracking, which saw a 22 percent boost.

* “Too often technology is a shiny object that’s looking for a problem to solve,” Pronovost noted. Organizations that are able to flip the switch and first ask ‘what problem are we solving?’ are more likely to succeed.

* An “enormous” opportunity for telehealth? Improving communication between joint specialists and primary care providers, which can help reduce readmissions.



Q&A with Peter Pronovost, Part 2 [Click here to read Part 1]

Gamble: Part of it using technology in more innovative ways. Can you talk about like how that has been done at UH?

Pronovost:  Sure. We’re doing some really cool stuff. We had to build a data model that allowed us to look at our patients really almost at three levels.

First, we need to look at cohorts of patients — who has diabetes or heart failure. We have to be able to look at providers — who’s having worse outcomes than others. We have to look at utilization — who’s being admitted to the ED or the hospital, and so we built an EDW that integrated our claims data, EHR data, billing data and appointment data, so that we can really get a holistic picture.

Then, we partnered with our data scientists to create a strategy for how we can support data science to help improve care.

Let me give you a couple examples. Given that we’re trying to improve defects in care and we have a lot of investments to make sure people in our system get a high level of care, we want to make sure our clinicians use our health system. In other words, keep care in network. And so we’ve created a dashboard where physicians get a report of what percent of their encounters are in our network. The denominator is the percent of encounters or dollars in Ohio,