Case studies

The Medical Center Health System

Overview

The Medical Center Health System (MCHS) is the most comprehensive healthcare provider in the Permian Basin and offers a broad range of advanced medical services to Odessa, Texas, and the 17 surrounding counties. Opened in 1949, MCHS has grown from a small county hospital into a 402-bed Level III trauma center with over 1,600 employees, serving over 100,000 patients annually. MCHS is the only full-service hospital in Odessa, Texas.  

Industry

  • Healthcare

Business drivers

Improve quality and accuracy of data in the Spok Care Connect® database in order to: 

  • Reduce care communication delays and errors 
  • Implement new HR data feed 
  • Eliminate the need for manual data entry 
  • Reduce administrative burden(s) 
  • Mitigate data issues, supplement staffing, and position the feed (and upgrade) project for success 

Solution

  • Spok Data Integrity Service 

Results

As part of the Data Integrity Service project, Spok consultants:  

  • Corrected over 33,000 records 
  • Deleted over 9% of 3,000 records (old, obsolete, unnecessary) from MCHS’ database  
  • Properly formatted over 48% of phone numbers in database
  • The project required minimal manual intervention and cleanup. 

The challenge

The Medical Center Health System (MCHS), located in Odessa, Texas, has used Spok as its health IT partner for over 15 years. Establishing effective clinical communication and improving patient care is a key to its motto of being its patients’ one source for health. However, outdated and inaccurate data in MCHS’ Spok Care Connect database caused communication delays and errors due to years of manual data entry without any data cleanup or validation projects to ensure normalized and accurate data. Additionally, staffing changes put a new call center supervisor in the role of managing the Spok solution, making it hard to ensure consistency of processes and methods for maintaining data. “There was a lot of junk in the database,” according to Gina Guzman, Call Center Supervisor. As a new owner of the technology, Guzman turned to Spok experts to help get her up to speed quickly.  

It was all worth it to me because I see the end result – having a clean database with a new feed in place to automate workflows. Everyone’s happier and the workflow is better, so we all benefit.

– Gina Guzman, Call Center Supervisor, MCHS

The solution

To expand the value of its Spok solutions, MCHS engaged Spok for the Data Integrity Service to drive faster, more efficient clinical communications, increase user adoption of Spok applications, and build a strong foundation to optimize their Spok solutions. Furthermore, MCHS wanted to build data strategies that follow Spok best practices and tie outcomes to improved key performance indicators to measure future return on investment. With this Value-Added Service, an experienced Spok data consultant outlined what items needed to be addressed to ensure the accuracy of the Spok data.  

For MCHS, the Spok data consultant (a member of the Spok Professional Services team) identified data gaps, quantified their impact, isolated cleanup tasks, cleaned the data in bulk, and validated the data post-cleanup. By doing this, MCHS not only created more accurate and up-to-date data for faster, smarter communication, but also created a customized environment to support their contact center workflows, which drive business rules for a solid foundation to build an HR feed. “Not having to delete everything manually was definitely a time savings. I’m so glad I didn’t have to do all that myself because I’m ready to get rid of all that unnecessary data,” said Guzman. “It was all worth it to me because I see the end result – having a clean database with a new feed in place to automate workflows. Everyone’s happier and the workflow is better, so we all benefit.” Although the full HR feed project is still in progress, MCHS looks forward to that next step. 

The result

The MCHS and Spok Data Integrity partnership has had numerous positive outcomes and efficiency improvements. While a considerable amount of the cleanup of this Data Integrity Service surrounded establishing formatting standards, overall data consistency, and the removal of unnecessary or non-applicable data, the results were immediately visible to MCHS operator team: 

This project:  

  • Corrected over 33,000 records  
  • Removed over 3,000 of these records– approximately 9% of the database total – which were old, outdated, and obsolete 
  • Properly formatted over 16,000 phone numbers (48% of total database)  

The Spok Data Integrity Service partnership at MCHS also required minimal manual intervention and cleanup. As a result, MHCS is now equipped with accurate and faster access to data, ensuring MCHS users can promptly connect with other caregivers to improve patient care coordination and needs.  

These impressive results highlight how clean and consistent data can mitigate patient care and safety risks, and reduce gaps and inconsistencies. In addition to the data cleanup saving time and administrative costs, MCHS now has faster communication workflows. MCHS is in the process of pursuing additional application benefits and enhancements with Spok. “Having dealt with hundreds and hundreds of vendors within project management, I found the Spok team to be very well organized. I could just sit back and watch,” says Pete Hottenstein, Project Manager at MCHS.  “I know we aren’t done, but I look forward to seeing the next steps and where we end up.”