Case Study: Health Care System achieves 21% increase in exclusive breast milk feeding and saves 12K charting hours per year with Health Catalyst

How to Improve the Population Health of Women and Newborns Exclusive Breast Milk Feeding

Health Care System, a multi-hospital healthcare system, needed to reliably measure and improve exclusive breast milk feeding for newborns but struggled with fragmented EMR data, inconsistent documentation, and time‑consuming manual chart abstraction that limited sampling and reporting. To address these challenges they engaged Health Catalyst and its products/services, including the Late-Binding™ Data Warehouse, the Population Analytics Advanced Application—Newborn Module, Installation Services, and Clinical Improvement Services.

Health Catalyst implemented an enterprise newborn analytics platform and newborn registry, built dashboards for TJC, data quality, and Baby‑Friendly tracking, and worked with the system to fix EMR capture and workflow gaps and train clinicians. The effort enabled self‑service analysis, eliminated much manual abstraction, and produced measurable gains: a rise in exclusive breast milk feeding from 69.3% to 83.9% (a 21% increase), improved clinician productivity with an estimated 12,000 fewer charting hours per year, and scalable, auditable reporting for regulatory and improvement initiatives.