In an exclusive HCTR interview accompanying the publication of an important new article, former home care CIO Fran Lorion summed up his “Lesson Number One,” acquired during an IT career that started at IBM and ended with 12 years at the Boston VNA.

The article, “Market Research / Market Share Analysis,” was inspired by an incident at the VNA when management noticed a decline in referrals but had no way of knowing what caused it. Were other area agencies experiencing the same decline or were they admitting patients the VNA used to get?

“Our systems could give us an enormous amount of information about the referrals that we admitted but not much was captured about those that we either didn’t admit or more importantly were never offered to us,” Lorion writes. “Is a steady referral level good or bad? What if the number of patients discharged to homecare in our area was on the increase while ours remained flat? We needed to know that.”

IT to the rescue

The story of how Lorion’s IT department research arrived at the answer is one that involves some creative detective work and a willingness on the part of management to buy into the project, literally. A small company investment in a state-run database report revealed actionable information that went completely counter to previous assumption.

“Agencies in other states should be able to do what we did,” Lorion told HCTR. “The baseline we could not have found on our own became clear after we purchase the right reports from the state. It was the best return on investment we ever got during my tenure as CIO.”

Simply purchasing a report and reading it was not the contribution that required the skills of Lorion’s department. He writes in his article that good skills in MS/Access, Excel and PowerPoint were required in order to compare state data with information that had to be extracted from the VNA’s own information systems so the two data sets could be compared. “A strong query and reporting tool from our system vendor proved invaluable,” he explains.

In the end, after literally hundreds of reports were analyzed, new marketing initiatives were developed, more effective programs were designed and new services were implemented to better meet the needs of the VNA’s Boston marketplace. Annual follow-up market share analyses have been showing good progress.

Lorion’s complete story, a bit lengthy for our usual format, will appear in another industry publication later this year. However, we offer a substantial summary elsewhere in this week’s issue.