28 Feb 2025
How Labcorp's Visiun analytics platform helped Ochsner Health improve efficiency, reduce costs and enhance patient outcomes
Introduction
Ochsner Health is Louisiana's largest non-profit academic healthcare system, with 46 owned, managed and affiliated hospitals and specialty hospitals across Louisiana, Mississippi and the Gulf South. The Ochsner Health network saw an opportunity to standardize practices and protocols and improve their data exchange across their 46 facilities by upgrading their technology.
To address these challenges and unify their network, Ochsner started its journey with Visiun, Labcorp’s enterprise analytics solution, in 2021. Visiun integrates data from across Ochsner’s network and delivers real-time analytics and insights that drive operational improvements and cost savings.
Key takeaways
After implementing Visiun, Ochsner achieved significant measurable improvements:
- Reduced average turnaround times for stat tests from the emergency department to 60 minutes, down from over 2 hours
- Nearly halved blood culture contamination rates system-wide
- Decreased sepsis mortality rates through earlier detection and targeted treatment
- Reduced length of stay and costs associated with sepsis cases
- Optimized antibiotic stewardship and reduced unnecessary antibiotic use
- Increased patient satisfaction scores
These results were achieved by harnessing Visiun's real-time analytics to identify opportunities and drive change across Ochsner's network.
Turning Data into Insights
A key advantage of Visiun is its ability to aggregate and analyze data from across disparate systems in real-time. Regina Galloway, manager of clinical pathology labs at Ochsner explains:
Visiun integrates data from across our network and delivers it in real time so we can assess and improve turnaround times, utilization, staffing and more.
For example, Ochsner used Visiun to analyze turnaround times for stat tests from their emergency departments. By establishing a goal of 60 minutes, they quickly identified outliers.
After analyzing the details, they uncovered bottlenecks in their processes and addressed them through improved communication, staff training and equipment investments. These insights, enabled by Visiun analytics, allowed Ochsner to reduce average turnaround times to meet their 60-minute goal.
Similar insights from Visiun data drove improvement in blood culture contamination rates. Visiun analytics revealed an opportunity to improve contamination rates by having dedicated phlebotomists help implement best practices, such as sterile collection kits, across facilities and job functions.
Over time, their network-wide contamination rate decreased by 50%, which reduced antibiotic use, the length of stay and overall costs.
Optimizing Sepsis Management
One of the most impactful applications of Visiun analytics was optimizing Ochsner's sepsis management program. Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality, but early detection and targeted treatment can dramatically improve outcomes.
By analyzing blood culture data in Visiun, Ochsner was able to rapidly identify positive results and optimize antibiotic therapy. They also provided stewardship teams with daily case reports so they could proactively manage new sepsis cases.
These efforts led to earlier sepsis detection and helped to reduce mortality rates, lengths of stay, and costs. The measurable results demonstrate the power of harnessing analytics to guide clinical and operational decisions.
The Road Ahead
The successes to date are only the beginning according to Galloway.
We continue to find new opportunities to collaborate across departments and drive improvement through the use of data and analytics.
Ochsner has plans to bring Visiun analytics to new areas, such as blood banking and anatomic pathology. They also plan to take advantage of new peer benchmarking capabilities to compare performance across their network.
By leveraging Visiun analytics, Ochsner Health transformed data into insights that improved outcomes across their health system. Their journey highlights the potential for analytics to drive healthcare transformation when the right technology and culture of improvement come together.
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