Turn Benchmarking into Better Outcomes
Touchstone® software helps hospitals and health systems understand how they are performing against peers, identify where improvement efforts will have the greatest impact, and take action before publicly reported measures and payment programmes reveal the results. It transforms complex clinical and operational data into timely, actionable benchmarking insights across measures such as mortality, length of stay, readmissions, patient safety, and quality performance.
Why Touchstone® Exists
Healthcare organisations are under constant pressure to improve quality, reduce unnecessary utilisation, and perform well in value-based reimbursement programmes. Yet many benchmarking sources rely on data that can be months or even years old. Building these benchmarks internally is expensive, time-consuming, and requires ongoing maintenance as industry definitions and regulatory methodologies change. Touchstone® addresses this challenge by standardising data, applying benchmarking models, and delivering results back to customers on a regular basis so they can identify opportunities sooner.
What Touchstone® Does
Touchstone® software ingests and normalises healthcare data, maps it to recognised quality and performance measures, and compares results against a broad benchmarking dataset. Health Catalyst maintains the underlying data preparation, measure computation, and model updates, reducing the operational burden on customers. Weekly data refreshes provide organisations with visibility into performance trends far sooner than traditional publicly available benchmarks.
Using advanced analytics and machine-learning-based benchmarking approaches, Touchstone® generates expected performance values for hospitals with similar patient populations and characteristics. Customers can compare observed versus expected outcomes and quickly identify where they are outperforming peers and where improvement efforts should be prioritised.
Key Benefits
Accelerate Improvement Efforts
Prioritise the measures, service lines, and populations where improvement initiatives are most likely to drive meaningful clinical and financial impact.
See Performance Earlier
Gain access to benchmarking insights significantly sooner than traditional public reporting programmes, allowing teams to act before performance issues affect ratings and reimbursement.
Reduce Data and Analytics Burden
Eliminate the need to build and maintain complex benchmarking processes internally. Health Catalyst manages data preparation, calculation logic, updates, and benchmarking models.
Understand Your Competitive Position
Compare performance against a large network of participating hospitals and healthcare organisations to understand relative strengths, risks, and opportunities.
Built on Real-World Healthcare Data
Touchstone® is supported by a large benchmarking dataset that includes contributions from numerous healthcare organisations across the United States. Current materials reference more than 250 hospitals and over 9 million inpatient visits, creating a robust foundation for statistically valid benchmarking and analytics.
Who Uses Touchstone®?
Touchstone® is designed for health systems, hospitals, quality leaders, operational executives, and performance-improvement teams who need reliable benchmarking data to guide strategic decisions, improve outcomes, reduce avoidable costs, and strengthen performance across key quality measures. Organisations ranging from individual hospitals to large multi-facility systems use Touchstone® to focus improvement resources where they can make the greatest difference.
From Benchmarking to Action
Touchstone® does more than show where performance stands today. It provides the insight organisations need to focus resources, prioritise improvement initiatives, and drive measurable change. By combining timely benchmarking, advanced analytics, and Health Catalyst expertise, Touchstone® helps healthcare organisations move from retrospective reporting to proactive performance improvement.
