I remember my first day working at KLAS. Everything was a complete blur. What I do recall, however, was hearing employees discussing Best in KLAS. That night, I even dreamed about winning a Best in KLAS award (even though I didn’t know what it was). With the Best in KLAS Awards 2013: Medical Equipment and Infrastructure report being published last week, I set out on a mission. I was determined to discover from an outside perspective what it really meant to be Best in KLAS.
I quickly recognized that there were three key groups involved: providers, vendors, and KLAS. I entered detective mode and decided to interview each of these groups to find out what Best in KLAS meant to them.
When I set out to interview providers, I lucked out and was able to listen in on interviews with a variety of CIOs and VPs who use KLAS data on a regular basis. Through all of these interviews, three consistent themes emerged about what Best in KLAS means to providers.
1) Make Better Decisions
Providers are constantly faced with critical purchasing decisions. The Best in KLAS report helps providers make more informed decisions by providing accurate, honest, and impartial data. When Dr. Mason Brown, CIO of Floyd Medical Group, was faced with purchasing a new ambulatory EMR system, he turned to KLAS. “It was the KLAS data that we relied heavily on during our initial phases of selection. We were able to rule out or rule in specific systems simply based off of the research KLAS made available to us.”
2) Be Heard and Be Counted
Best in KLAS provides a platform for providers to be heard and be counted. Providers are able to share their experiences with different products and services and to learn from their peers’ experiences. In regards to his participation with KLAS data, Russ Branzell, CEO/President of CHIME, stated, “We want to be part of the process. We want to make sure it [the information] is the most accurate and that our input is in there.” Ultimately, it is the collective voice of providers that makes KLAS data accurate, honest, and impartial.
3) Improve Healthcare
KLAS enables providers to deliver better care by providing them with unbiased data. As Branzell explained, it “gives us a head start on how to adapt and what technology to adopt to improve our care continuum. It really gives us the trends of which technology companies are really focused on improving quality.”
Providers also discussed how the data helps vendors produce better products. Amy Feaster, VP of Information Technology at Centura Health, said that KLAS data improves healthcare by “getting honest feedback to our vendors, which in turn helps them improve their products and services.”
There is no denying that KLAS data has a significant impact on both providers and vendors. But in order to really understand the meaning of Best in KLAS, I needed to interview the man who started it all, KLAS founder Kent Gale.
When I asked Kent to share what Best in KLAS means from his perspective, he explained that winning this award essentially means that a vendor has been identified by providers and by the healthcare community, as outperforming the others in a particular space. Through Best in KLAS, providers get to “speak to the performance of the vendors they have purchased and the services they have received.”
Originally, many vendors viewed Best in KLAS as a promotional tool. However, “over time, we have seen a huge transition,” he noted. “The meaning of Best in KLAS has changed because now there is a lot of energy around ‘I want to beat my competitor’ or ‘I want to be Best in KLAS,’ and who ultimately wins as a result of that energy? The providers. The providers win because the vendors perform better and better every year. The average scores have gone up dramatically over the past 15 years. This tells us that vendors are paying attention to providers’ needs, trying to do better, and setting the bar higher.”
Best in KLAS, he said, pushes vendors to continually improve, which in turn, benefits providers. Vendors and providers know that it is not KLAS that decides the winners; the providers decide. That’s where the power comes from.
It was through this last interview that I was able to put all of the pieces together and walk away with a sound understanding of what it really means to be Best in KLAS. I have learned a lot, and most importantly, I learned that I get to be a part of something much bigger and more important than I had ever imagined.
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