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By combining the hard data of medicine with the soft skills of presentation and public speaking, the Booth Healthcare Analytics Laboratory is giving new solutions to students — and new life to hospitals.
Marcia Kraniak — 79 years old, from the South Side of Chicago — went home from the hospital eight weeks ago. She had been admitted to the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCM) with congestive heart failure and spent three days there. Fluid had built up in her body, and her heart was too weak to pump enough blood. She couldn’t move around easily. Two months after leaving the hospital, however, she’s doing well on her new regimen at home.
Shortly after Kraniak arrived in the UCM emergency department, hospital staff identified that her medical condition, her home life, and her mental state made it less than likely that she would get well after she went home. A new admissions algorithm predicted she might have to come back to the hospital soon. So the cardiology and nursing teams at UCM applied a special new protocol on her behalf. They gave Kraniak (a patient invented for this article) a detailed plan to take care of herself — including instructions to eat better, lay off the salt, and try to take a short walk every day — and simplified her medications to help her stay on her regimen and get well more quickly.
In the past, hospitals didn’t closely monitor whether patients had to be readmitted shortly after an original hospital visit. If patients returned with the same health issues, they got patched up again, the hospital got paid again, and nobody tracked how many patients made this boomerang trajectory.
The Affordable Care Act changed the game. Congress decided that Medicare, the federal insurance program for people over 65, will now penalize hospitals if a heart-failure patient comes back within 30 days. Under the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, hospitals now must report their rates of 30-day readmission. If their rates are worse than average or than would be statistically expected, Medicare will reduce government reimbursements across the board for all patients at that institution. Medicare also now publishes every hospital’s results on its website, medicare.gov/hospitalcompare, putting each hospital’s reputation for quality of care at risk.
For UCM, this presented a fresh business problem — and an opportunity to demonstrate that it truly can be “at the forefront of medicine,” per its slogan. Its heart-failure readmission rate in 2014 was 20 percent, better than the national rate of 22.3 percent, but not good enough. Cardiologists and nurses at the hospital devised the new protocol used on patients like Kraniak to try to reduce those readmissions.
But was this new protocol effective? For University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Dan Adelman, this was just the kind of problem he’d been seeking. Each spring quarter, he offers the Healthcare Analytics Laboratory, a real-world exercise in big-data research for a carefully selected cadre of MBA students.
“The health-care industry is a wreck. It desperately needs our help,” he told his 24 students on April 1, the first day of class. He had persuaded Chicago hospitals and doctors to share their data on four hard-to-solve problems. (For more on these projects, see “Data and Diagnostics.”) Now it was up to the students to drill through the numbers and figure out the answers.
