Children’s Hospital Colorado has been reshaping how clinicians use health data by moving away from siloed reporting and toward data-driven workflows powered by custom, self-service dashboards inside the electronic medical record. Over the past several years, the hospital’s Analytics Resource Center—working with clinical leaders such as Miriam Conant, director of patient safety—has focused on making data both higher quality and easier to access, with the goal of improving patient safety and care coordination. Located in the Denver area, the health system says the effort helps teams extract meaningful insights from the same clinical data that already flows through routine documentation, turning
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it actually mean to move from data silos to data-driven decisions at Children’s Hospital Colorado?
Instead of relying on separate reports or disconnected systems, the hospital focused on turning the same clinical data that already gets documented into usable insights. By reducing siloed reporting and embedding analytics into day-to-day workflows, teams can make decisions faster and with more consistent context across patient safety and care coordination activities.
Why create custom, self-service dashboards inside the electronic medical record (EMR) rather than using standalone reporting tools?
Dashboards inside the EMR bring insights closer to the point of care, which helps clinicians act on information while they’re documenting and making decisions. Self-service access also reduces delays caused by requesting custom reports, making it easier for clinical teams to explore trends and anomalies without waiting on specialized analytics support.
How does the Analytics Resource Center improve data quality before clinicians use it for safety and coordination?
The Analytics Resource Center works alongside clinical leaders to raise data quality and ensure the information behind dashboards is trustworthy. That focus on accuracy and usability is essential, because dashboards only help if they reflect the real clinical story—supporting patient safety work and strengthening coordination across care teams using the same underlying data.
What role do clinical leaders (like Miriam Conant) play in making analytics practical for frontline teams?
Clinical leaders help define what matters operationally—such as patient safety priorities and coordination needs—and guide how the analytics should be interpreted in real workflows. This collaboration helps ensure dashboards are designed to answer concrete clinical questions, not just present numbers, so teams can convert insights into consistent actions.
How can the hospital tell whether these data-driven workflows are actually improving care coordination and patient safety?
The hospital’s aim is to make teams better at extracting meaningful insights from routine documentation, then applying them to safety and coordination. Evaluations typically focus on whether clinicians can more easily find relevant information, identify issues sooner, and follow through with safer, more coordinated decisions—outcomes tied to the usability and reliability of the dashboard-driven process.