(February 2022) – In today's ever-changing environment, the need for reliable, accessible data to make important decisions is crucial. The Kansas Hospital Association appreciates this need and offers our member hospitals access to current, dependable data to support strategic and financial planning, quality improvement initiatives, and workforce issues. To support this demand, a variety of products and services are offered as part of membership. Member facilities submit data electronically, and KHA provides web-based reporting tools designed to turn that data into useful and actionable information.

The most powerful set of data compiled by KHA is the hospital patient discharge data submitted monthly. KHA partners with the Hospital Industry Data Institute, a data company within the Missouri Hospital Association, to manage this massive data-collection process. The data are uploaded quarterly to the KHA HIDI Analytic Advantage Plus reporting tool. Analytic Advantage Plus provides access to inpatient and outpatient market share, hospital-level reports for all participating hospitals. KHA authorized users have access to strategic planning tools including customized hospital discharge reports, hospital outpatient reports and pre-designed dashboards, all critical to successful strategic planning. This month, HIDI released a new Tableau-based reporting platform called Advantage Optics, providing enhanced data visualization.

For the past 18 years, Kansas hospitals and clinics have had access to QHi, a KHA-developed, enterprise-wide, benchmarking tool where participants collect, trend and compare monthly quality, finance, workforce and patient satisfaction metrics in real-time. Developed in 2003 in partnership with the Kansas Office of Rural Health, Healthworks and KHA, QHi now supports many federal, state and local quality initiatives across the country. In the past year, QHi continued its mission to reduce the hospital-reporting burden by developing a number of data upload options and enhancing the scheduling of reports, bringing the data directly to stakeholders.

Another valuable data offering is the KHA compensation data. The annual report provides compensation data for 500 plus health care positions, including executive staff through Gallagher. The survey opens in January, and results are available to participating hospitals in April. The reports provide detailed information on management, staff and physician positions. In addition, each report is flexible to allow participants to break out the information by region, hospital size and operational budget.

An additional workforce data program offered by KHA is the KHA Annual Workforce Questionnaire. The survey collects valuable information on vacancies and turnover for key health care positions. Results are used to compile the annual KHA Healthcare Vacancy and Turnover Report and are published on the KHA website.

Please never hesitate to call on KHA staff for assistance with access to programs or for interpretation of the myriad of reports now at your fingertips!