Touchstone

Touchstone^® is a national repository of granular data from Health Catalyst clients and third-party data sources that enables benchmarking, advanced comparative analytics, and real-world evidence analysis. It provides a central environment to monitor and benchmark your organization’s performance against other healthcare systems—and delivers those benchmarks directly to your EDW so everything is in one place.

The problem

Benchmarks and comparative analytics play a vital role in helping identify improvement opportunities. Benchmarking is typically separate from other analytics, thus analysts have to manually review thousands of benchmarks to determine the most promising opportunities, with little ability to understand the drivers of performance.

Researchers need systemwide data—and an understanding of the inherent variation in that data—to determine which care pathways lead to the best outcomes for patients. They also need real-world data to perform clinical trials and identify provider sites that are best positioned to participate in specific trials based on the patients they serve.

Our approach

Unlike traditional, siloed approaches to benchmarking and comparative analytics, Touchstone provides unprecedented access to healthcare data analytics—directly from your EDW. Gain benchmarking flexibility and access to real-world insights, all while consolidating vendors and reducing cost.

Benefits and features

• Gain benchmarking flexibility. Integrate benchmarks across your entire enterprise analytics stack while benchmarking any measure with our custom benchmarking service.
• Consolidate vendors and reduce cost. Touchstone benchmarking data products are offered as part of the technology subscription so you can eliminate the need for vendors.
• Access real-world insights. Touchstone includes one of the largest national registries of confirmed COVID-19 patients anywhere in the world, including regulatory-grade national patient registries.
• Access the latest data and eliminate manual work. Touchstone data products are maintained by Health Catalyst (i.e., data cleanup, extraction, and ingestion) and are updated more frequently than other data aggregation architectures.

Use cases

• A researcher is assessing how various medications affect the COVID-19 population in the healthcare system. Using the COVID-19 National Patient Registry in Touchstone, he analyzes the impact of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and Remdesivir on health outcomes (e.g., length of stay and mortality), while accounting for patient demographic and comorbidity covariates.
• A Health Plan Analyst is looking for opportunities to reduce costs of joint replacements. She turns to Touchstone and identifies an orthopedic surgeon who performs knee replacements at 20% lower cost than benchmark, with a 15% better than benchmark readmission rate. The healthcare system analyzes this surgeon’s practices and identifies several opportunities for savings on supplies—then makes those supplies a standard across the healthcare system.