The American Nurses Credentialing Center’s (ANCC) Magnet Recognition Program® honors healthcare organizations that demonstrate strong nursing leadership and a commitment to advancing organizational performance and patient care. Nursing leadership at Carle Health found its Magnet® data submission process inefficient, requiring hundreds of hours of manually aggregating data and measuring performance. By leveraging its data platform and analytics applications, Carle Health streamlined its data collection and visualization processes, simplifying Magnet® submission and successfully showcasing nursing quality.
Organizations that achieve Magnet® designation are recognized for having nursing leaders who effectively align their strategic goals to enhance patient outcomes and overall organizational performance.1 As part of the Magnet® submission, applicants must collect and submit nurse-sensitive quality indicators for each unit and benchmark performance against a database to support research and quality improvement initiatives.
Nursing leadership at Carle Health was preparing for its Magnet® survey and recognition, but burdensome manual reporting impeded effectiveness. Leaders had to manually track and report performance for 140 different departments, each tracking 20 different metrics.
After manually gathering data and reporting metric performance, nurse leaders were challenged to review thousands of metrics and determine which metrics would be shared to illustrate the organizations’ accomplishments. Once nursing leadership selected metrics, teams had to spend time creating visualizations that met the Magnet® submission requirements.
Carle Health needed to gain efficiencies, automate Magnet® data reporting, and improve insight into performance.
Carle Health leveraged the Health Catalyst® Data Platform, enabling the organization to collect, aggregate, report, and visualize data for its Magnet® submission. The Health Catalyst Tech-Enabled Managed Services (TEMS) Data and Analytics team members supporting Carle Health used the data platform and partnered with Carle Health nursing leadership to develop an analytics application to automate data into a single source, streamlining data submission for the Magnet® survey and recognition.
Nurse leaders use the application to easily visualize metric performance across the entire organization, including key data for patient experience, nursing-sensitive clinical outcomes, and nurse satisfaction. Nurse leaders can use the application to effectively identify high-performing units and opportunities for improvement and quickly identify the best metrics to submit as part of the recognition process.
Each visualization is ready to submit to ANCC, simplifying the reporting process and meeting Magnet® data display specifications. The visualizations include data at the unit level, a measure of central tendency, and a national comparison—automating data analysis and generating new performance insights.
Carle Health used the data platform and visualizations from its new analytics application to demonstrate its nursing excellence. The application visualizations were accepted by ANCC without edits, relieving the team of hundreds of hours of manual data collection, aggregation, reporting, and visualization preparation for each site visit.
One of Carle Health’s regions successfully achieved Magnet with Distinction®—a designation recognizing the highest-performing Magnet® organizations around the world, including:
This region earned three Magnet® exemplar awards, including:
“The Health Catalyst® data platform and analytics application transformed how nurse leaders track and showcase nursing excellence, saving hundreds of hours previously spent on manual data reporting and visualizations.”
- Jaymie Green, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, Vice President Patient Care and Chief Nursing Officer, Carle Health East Region
Carle Health will use its data and analytics to monitor and report performance and provide guidance on improvement opportunities, patient outcomes, and the nurse practice environment.
