KeyMetrics

Objective: Turn hospital data into shared insight

The Michigan Health & Hospital Association represents every community hospital in Michigan, and one of the most valuable things it does for its members is help them measure themselves against their peers. Through programs like the MHA Keystone Center, hospitals report operational and quality metrics on a recurring basis, and the association turns those numbers into benchmarks that drive safer, better care.

Collecting that data across dozens of health systems, hundreds of facilities, and thousands of units is hard to do with spreadsheets and email. Definitions drift, submissions arrive late or incomplete, and by the time the data is cleaned it’s out of date. In 2018 the MHA asked Web Ascender to build a platform that would make data collection reliable, repeatable, and easy for the people entering it, and make the results immediately useful for benchmarking.

What Web Ascender Did

Web Ascender designed and built KeyMetrics, a multi-tenant healthcare data collection and benchmarking platform. Administrators define reusable metrics and assemble them into surveys that run monthly, quarterly, or annually against a hierarchy of health systems, facilities, units, and patients. Contributors at each organization enter or bulk-upload their data through a guided, validated form, and the collected data flows into a reporting layer that feeds business intelligence dashboards, so members can compare their performance with their peers.

• Multi-tenant from the start - each member association runs as its own tenant with its own branding, custom landing pages, and fully isolated data
• A configurable survey builder - text, number, date, dropdown, radio, checkbox, and calculated metrics with formula-based dependencies and conditional questions, so new initiatives launch without new code
• Recurring collection periods - daily through annual schedules that generate submissions automatically, with configurable due and lock dates and email reminders that keep reporting on track
• Hierarchical entity management - health systems, facilities, units, and patients, with bulk imports, custom fields, and entity merging as organizations change
• Role-based access control - roles from read-only contributors to organization and super administrators, plus project-scoped and entity-scoped permissions so people see exactly what they should
• Guided data entry - inline validation, per-question history and audit trails, and bulk submission by spreadsheet import for organizations with data already in hand
• Export and reporting - reusable export templates, spreadsheet downloads, and a dedicated reporting database that feeds BI dashboards
• Secure account management - email invitations, two-factor authentication, single sign-on with the association’s membership system, terms-of-service acceptance tracking, and automatic deactivation of stale accounts
• Secure file sharing - documents distributed to specific users or organizations with expiring access
• Admin content and operations tools - a rich-text page editor, in-app notifications, activity analytics, and a job monitoring console for the background processing that powers imports, exports, submission generation, and scheduled maintenance

Under the hood, KeyMetrics runs on Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL with Hotwire and Stimulus on the front end, S3-backed file storage, and containerized deployment.

The Outcome

KeyMetrics gives the MHA a dependable engine for the data behind its quality and safety work. Member hospitals know what’s due and when, enter data through forms that catch mistakes before they’re submitted, and see their results alongside their peers. The MHA launches new surveys and initiatives on its own schedule, and because the platform is multi-tenant, the same system can serve other associations without a second codebase.

KeyMetrics is one of several custom applications Web Ascender has built for the MHA over a partnership that began in 2016 and continues today.