As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. For health system strategy and planning teams, sometimes the most helpful picture is a customized map. Maps can be used to tell a story, guide conversations with stakeholders, and ultimately empower strategy and planning teams to be a support system to other departments within the health system.
The Buxton team spoke with Blaine Dinkin, strategy associate at The University of Miami Health System (UHealth), about how she uses SCOUT’s mapping features to create custom visuals to answer business questions and support strategy discussions. Here’s what she shared.
Use Case #1: Illustrating Where Patients Originate
Blaine and the UHealth strategy team like to create custom thematics in the Areas of Interest section of SCOUT to illustrate where patients originate for specific procedures or appointment types. Best of all, it can be done without uploading actual patient data to SCOUT.
“That’s been really helpful as we’ve become partners with different departments to really start the conversation,” she explains.
The process usually begins with a request from a specific department that wants to learn more about where their patients originate. Blaine works with UHealth’s IT team to pull de-identified patient data at the ZIP code level from Epic. She then maps it in SCOUT as a custom thematic to visualize patient origin areas.
When presenting the data back to the requesting department, Blaine and the strategy team typically favor a quick, one-page summary to meet the needs of busy department chairs. This often includes a map showing patient draw across their home state, an additional map that zooms in on their primary tri-county service area, and a quick summary of visits by county pulled from Epic data.
Custom patient origin thematics help the team to understand geographic concentrations of patients and how UHealth can best meet their community’s needs.
Use Case #2: Understanding the Competitive Landscape
Another way UHealth uses SCOUT maps is to understand the competitive landscape around their facilities. Because competition in Florida is high and Miami-area traffic is a concern for patients, UHealth wants to ensure their facilities are optimally located.
The strategy team uses the drive-time trade area feature in SCOUT to understand how long it takes to get to their facilities and which competitor facilities are within that trade area. For example, they may prepare a map with a 10-minute drive-time around one of their current facilities and then turn on the competition layer to see which competitors are within the trade area. The output can help them to determine if it makes sense to build new facilities, add services to existing facilities, or consider a different part of the market.
Other SCOUT Mapping Tips for Health System Strategy Teams
If you want to use SCOUT maps in your own health system strategy team, consider these other tips and best practices.
- Use maps as a conversation starter. Preparing an initial overview map is a great conversation starter with departments and leaders, explains Blaine. It often prompts additional questions, which the strategy team can use as a springboard into deeper conversations and support.
- Work closely with your IT department. Establishing a good relationship and process with your IT department is helpful in ensuring you have exactly what you need to create custom maps.
- Remember your audience. “It’s important to understand who’s asking for what and why,” reminds Blaine. A strategy team’s role is to “tell the story and provide a recommendation.” Knowing your audience helps you to do that more effectively.
- Combine data with local market knowledge. “You need to know the data along with what’s going on in the market, because the data can only speak to so much,” observes Blaine. Data is a powerful tool, but it needs context for proper interpretation.
- Consider using split views. The split map view in SCOUT is a helpful shortcut when telling the story of a geographic area. Show the same area side by side with different data layers– such as current year demographics next to five-year projections.
How is your team using the Buxton Platform to solve real-world problems? We’d love to hear your story! Contact us at clients@buxtonco.com.
