Leveraging performance analytics to improve integration of care

The need for healthcare systems to provide efficient, effective and integrated care has put an emphasis on performance analytics. However while performance analytics can measure outcomes and suggest policy and protocol for achieving efficiency; it does not drive the actual integration of care processes. There is a need for research that develops fine-grained metrics and illustrates how to link them into the underlying clinical care processes in order to drive and support integration of care. An integrated case study of cardiac care processes and performance analytics we have been developing at a community hospital in Ontario is used to illustrate our approach. We analyze how fine-grained metrics can be linked into cardiac care processes to address high level performance objectives, and present a technology assessment to identify how software engineering support for the collection and communication of these fine-grained metrics can be provided.