Upgrades to EnclarityTM Dashboards Improve Capabilities and User Experience

The EnclarityTM dashboard and reporting tool is central to the value proposition Enclara Pharmacia provides to hospices. Enclarity empowers hospice administrators and clinicians to do their own day-to-day monitoring of metrics that are important to them. Enclara account managers and clinical managers also use Enclarity to provide actionable information to their clients on a regular basis.

Now Enclarity has gotten a makeover. The new software platform vastly improves both capabilities and user experience. It’s a transformative change, says Senior Director, IT Business Intelligence Dan Fobes. “One of the things I recognized upon joining Enclara two years ago is that we had outgrown the technology. The dashboards are one of the differentiators between us and our competitors, so it is important that they continue to help drive the business.”

Enclarity has two dashboards – Digital Usage and Pharmacy Utilization. Digital Usage shows utilization of various electronic tools that can improve efficiency and accuracy. Pharmacy Utilization highlights key performance indicators (KPIs) such as formulary adherence, ancillary service fees (such as rush delivery) and other trends that can have a big impact on overall costs. Together, these tools inform business decisions from prescribing patterns to operational efficiencies, helping hospices achieve their goals.

The Digital Usage dashboard is managed by Enclara’s recently-formed Digital Team that oversees the customer experience for client-facing interfaces. By using the dashboard, administrators can ensure that teams are moving toward standardized workflows that take advantage of modern technology.

One important KPI is usage of E3, Enclara’s system for ordering new medications and refills. By using Enclara’s E3 MobileTM app or E3 ConnectTM desktop portal, nurses can spend less time on the phone and more with patients, improving care and patient satisfaction. The dashboard also tracks use of e-prescribing which reduces errors and simplifies compliance.

For Nicole Brnich, the Digital Team’s Director, Product Management and Support , the first rule for the new Digital Usage dashboard was to do no harm. “We don’t want to disrupt what people are already doing,” Brnich said. “The new dashboard looks similar, but has more capabilities to dive down into the data in ways that improve patient care. For instance, with the new dashboard, users can apply a date range along with other filters to make trending reports on the fly. What used to be a manual process is now automatic.”

Hospices will benefit from these improvements not only in their own reporting, but through the improved business intelligence they receive from their account managers. One big change is that account managers can share live snapshots instead of creating reports based on downloads, meaning their reports for clients update in real time and present unlimited capability for customization.

“We now have the ability to show trends and break them down by branch, team and even individual clinician,” said Senior Account Manager Sydney Smith-Rikard. “We can go from just pointing out something like overreliance on rush delivery to collaborating on a detailed action plan to really change behavior.”

For Fobes, the biggest challenge has been choosing what to leave out. The new platform presents unlimited enhancement opportunities. However, the more tools you load into a dashboard, the more complicated it is to use and maintain. Instead, his development team started by recreating the data elements that are most meaningful for clients while simplifying the user experience. “We were mindful of the number of mouse clicks that people have to do, mindful of their time,” Fobes said. “Everything is context-sensitive so with one click they’re going to get everything they need. In the old platform, you might drill down four levels to find the information you want. With the new dashboard, we condensed it to a summary and detail level. It’s all right there.”

While migrating the Digital Usage dashboard was relatively simple, the Pharmacy Utilization dashboard was a larger undertaking. That’s in part because it pulls from more data sources. However, much of the extra work resulted in extra features. Vice President of Clinical Services Raymond Capella oversees client analytics, including the clinical dashboard. He came to the process with a lot of feedback from clients on features that would be most impactful to their business. “We’re not simply converting from one software system to another software system,” Capella said. “We’re presenting a tool to clients that has a totally new set of capabilities to put meaningful information in users’ hands. They can slice the data and aggregate it differently based upon how they’re managing their business.”

Raymond Capella, PharmD, MBA
VP, Clinical Services

One of the things Capella is most excited about is the ability for users to view data in whatever way is most meaningful to them. For instance, a large hospice could choose to filter by state or region, then by division whereas a smaller one might choose to look at trends at the team level. “The nice thing about the new platform is that it’s easy to seamlessly navigate through utilization trends, identify opportunities and benchmark against national standards,” Capella said.

This isn’t a change that happens overnight. Cross-functional teams have been working for over six months to ensure that the next generation of Enclarity delivers for a variety of internal and external stakeholders. With the launch of the new dashboards, the Enclara team has shifted focus to developing instructions, webinars and other training opportunities to help users transition to the new system. The old dashboards will remain available with no further enhancements until adoption reaches a certain level.

Long term, Fobes expects to move to what he calls persona-based dashboards. Instead of two dashboards for everybody, there could be dashboards tailored to specific needs, such as clinical, operational and financial as well as professional roles such as executive, field operations, and administrators. “When you understand your audience like we do at Enclara, you can get more targeted and turn this one dashboard into five dashboards for five different personas. It’s a win-win. The user experience is improved because targeted dashboards only display the information you need to act on. On the development side, we can become more agile in making targeted improvements,” Fobes said.

The new software platform positions Enclarity for growth in the area of predictive analytics, which uses machine learning to show the likely effects of operational interventions or external factors. The future of Enclarity is continuous improvement, equipping users with the power to improve care, lower costs, reduce risk and simplify compliance.

“As far as the hospice pharmacy sector is concerned,” said Capella, “It’s a market-leading solution that will expand on our goal to help our hospice partners operate more efficiently and more effectively, enabling greater focus on patient care.”