How Axiom Clinical Analytics Supports Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation Reporting

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Syntellis’ Axiom™ Clinical Analytics features ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE) reporting to help hospitals and health systems support a continuous reporting cycle for privileging, credentialing, peer review, and clinical improvement. 

Answers to the Top 8 OPPE Questions

1. How does physician privileging work?

OPPE Reporting allows your organization to perform systematic measurement, evaluation, and follow-through to support compliance and maintain hospital accreditation. Axiom Clinical Analytics supports effective ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE) to identify physicians who might not be achieving quality-of-care standards and focused professional practice evaluation (FPPE) to monitor physicians identified by OPPE.

2. How does Clinical Analytics support OPPE credentialing requirements? 

You can vet physician competence and practice history through performance reporting to meet OPPE credentialing requirements and support physician recredentialing as needed. Complete credentialing to comply with state regulations and payer requirements.

3. How can peer reviews improve quality?

By aggregating data for agreed-upon OPPE metrics in the current period and over time, you can use peer reviews to analyze technical and service quality, patient safety, and resource utilization. Data can be reported to your medical executive committee, which interprets the data and makes recommendations to the Board of Trustees.

4. How can OPPE improve clinical outcomes?

OPPE Reporting provides a continuous feedback loop for key process and outcome measures, adjusted for severity and risk. Reporting cascades through the system, hospital, service line, department, clinical unit, physician, and patient levels, graphically displaying calls to action. 

5. Does OPPE include both inpatient and outpatient reporting?

Of course! Axiom’s OPPE Reporting supports reporting needs with two primary areas of functionality: comprehensive inpatient and outpatient reporting and physician attribution reporting. Click here to review a sample report.

Axiom’s reporting capabilities enable organizations to enhance and streamline their physician reporting process. Users can create reports based on inpatient and outpatient data for individual physicians and physician groups using a balanced set of measures — patient safety, quality, patient satisfaction, utilization, and cost — in addition to other OPPE metrics, such as patient complaints and delinquent histories and physicals (H&Ps). 

Axiom Clinical Analytics Inpatient and Outpatient Reporting can include 17 analytics, such as physician volumes, procedure counts, and outcome visualizations. Axiom Clinical Analytics users can also electronically create, distribute, and review custom physician reports within the application, modifying report profiles, use of benchmarks, selected measures, and more.

6. How efficient is OPPE Reporting?

Users can create reports on a preselected schedule using automated scheduling functionality, electronically routing reports through a hierarchy of reviewers — based on parameters such as time period, physician or physician group, and physician role — where each reviewer can complete standardized reviews, annotations, and sign-offs. User-specific permissions allow for security across the application.

7. Can physicians access their reports?

With Axiom Clinical Analytics, physicians can explore their own OPPE reports and drill down into their cases through dynamic physician scorecards and interactive dashboards. Physician scorecards and dashboards provide data based on the user’s role. Administrators can manage and track all reporting, including in-progress workflows and completed workflows, and report reviewers can see their own user-specific pending and completed reviews.

8. Can physician contribution be measured?

Axiom Clinical Analytics’ powerful physician attribution algorithm works to identify an attributed physician who made the largest contribution to each encounter’s outcomes of care. The attributed physician for each encounter is defined through a rule-based hierarchy that looks at data elements including cost, orders, ordering physician, diagnostic and procedural coding, and diagnosis-related group (DRG). Click here to learn more.

System logic helps prioritize certain charges, such as operating room charges and charges based on the DRG. 

Axiom software describes how the attributed physician was selected, with user-override capabilities, and further identifies physicians with the highest charges and highest number of orders by encounter.

Ready to Take the Next Step? 

Schedule a demo to see how Clinical Analytics can streamline OPPE and FPPE reporting, as well as enable data-based decisions throughout your organization.

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MORE HEALTHCARE RESOURCES

September Health System Margins Remain Strong as Outpatient Activity Rebounds 

September’s data shows continued margin strength along with shifting operational trends. Operating margins held steady at the year’s peak, supported by relatively stable total expenses, while outpatient activity and revenue increased. Yet rising non-labor costs and declining physician productivity remain challenges.

September 2026 data highlights:

• Health system operating margin growth remained steady at a national median of +1.0%, staying at the peak for the year.

• Outpatient visits rebounded this month, up 3.0%, but inpatient admissions, observation visits, and emergency visits all saw declines.

• In alignment with patient volume fluctuations, outpatient revenue increased 1.3% and inpatient revenue declined 1.4% compared to last month.

• Total expenses remained steady, dipping just 0.2% compared to last month, but remain up 3.8% year over year.

Hospital Performance Benchmarks

*Note: Operating margins are calculated on a percentage point change basis. The table above reflects individual hospital performance, which may or may not include enterprise-level operating or administrative expense.

Operating Margins: Health system operating margins held steady at 1.0%, maintaining the highest level recorded this year. At the individual hospital level, operating margin increased 1.2% from last month and 0.4% year over year, indicating continued improvement in hospital-level performance. 

Hospital Expenses: Total expenses remained relatively stable, declining just 0.2% month over month while remaining 3.8% higher year over year. Total non-labor expenses moved in the opposite direction, increasing 1.0% from last month and 3.5% year over year. Labor expenses, by contrast, declined 2.4% month over month but remain up 4.0% compared to last year.

Hospital Revenues: Gross operating revenue edged up 0.3% month over month and remains up 7.7% year over year. Revenue levels varied by care setting. Inpatient revenue declined 1.4% from last month but remains 5.5% higher year over year, while outpatient revenue increased 1.3% month over month and 9.3% year over year. Outpatient revenue continues to show stronger growth than inpatient revenue. 

Source: Comparative Analytics

Patient Volume Benchmarks 

Hospital inpatient and outpatient volumes are drawn from analysis of more than 10 million patient visits.

Hospital volumes: Patient volume trends were mixed in September, with outpatient visits increasing while other care settings saw declines. Outpatient volumes rose 3.0% month over month and 3.5% year over year. Inpatient admissions declined 1.0% from last month but are up 4.6% compared to last year. Observation visits fell 3.5% month over month and 0.7% year over year, while emergency visits continued to trend lower, declining 3.6% from August and 0.2% year over year. The continued decline in emergency visits is part of a larger trend that may point to shifting utilization patterns across care settings.

Physician Practice Benchmarks 

A look at last month's key performance indicators from more than 10,000 physician practices. 

“Investment” measures per-physician profitability from patient care: net patient revenue minus total operating expenses, divided by physician FTEs. “Support Staff” includes all ancillary, business operations, clinical support, and front office personnel.

Physician practice expenses & productivity: Physician revenue increased 2.2% from the previous quarter and 5.6% from Q3 a year ago. Productivity continued its downward trend, declining 3.5% quarter over quarter and 5.1% year over year. Direct expenses fell 4.8% from the previous quarter and 0.3% compared with Q3 a year ago.

Outlook

The September data reinforces that margin performance is increasingly tied to how organizations manage the mix of care, not simply total volume. Outpatient activity continues to grow while inpatient and emergency utilization soften, while non-labor costs remain elevated and physician productivity declines. As these patterns persist, organizations may need to be more deliberate about where they add capacity, how they deploy labor, and which service lines and care settings support sustainable growth.

If you’d like to see this (or other healthcare performance) data sliced for your organization, drop us a note!

Explore the previous monthly report to compare historical insights.

Explore other healthcare data resources