Business Context

You are the analytics lead supporting the Environment of Care (EOC) Committee for a 900-bed academic medical center with 3 hospitals, 40 outpatient clinics, ~18,000 employees, and Joint Commission accreditation. The EOC committee meets monthly and is accountable for patient/staff safety across domains like life safety, hazardous materials, medical equipment, utilities, emergency management, and security. A recent internal audit flagged inconsistent reporting across sites, and the COO wants a standardized metrics package that can be reviewed in 10 minutes during the committee meeting and used to drive corrective actions.

Over the last quarter, the system saw:

• A 15% increase in employee safety events (mostly slips/trips)
• A 2x increase in utility-related work orders in one hospital (Hospital B)
• A near-miss involving a blocked egress route in an outpatient clinic

Stakeholders (Facilities, Nursing leadership, Infection Prevention, Risk Management, Security, and Compliance) are asking: “What metrics should we report to the EOC committee, how should we define them, and how do we know whether a change is real vs noise?”

Metric Scenario

You need to propose a complete EOC metrics framework that:

• Balances leading indicators (preventive controls) and lagging indicators (harm/events)
• Enables cross-site comparability despite different volumes and staffing
• Supports root-cause diagnosis (not just trend reporting)
• Is defensible for regulatory review (definitions, data lineage, and auditability)

The committee chair also wants a “single headline metric” to open each meeting, with a small set of drill-downs that point to actionable owners.

Available Data

Requirements (What you must produce)

1. Define a North Star / headline EOC metric appropriate for monthly governance (include inclusion/exclusion rules).
2. Specify 8–12 supporting KPIs mapped to EOC domains (life safety, utilities, security, hazardous materials, equipment, emergency preparedness), clearly labeling each as leading vs lagging.
3. Provide a calculation approach for the headline metric and 2–3 key KPIs, including normalization (e.g., per 1,000 patient-days, per 10,000 labor hours).
4. Propose a decomposition plan to diagnose the Q/Q changes above (employee slips/trips increase; Hospital B utility work orders spike; egress near-miss).
5. Recommend benchmarks/targets and how you’d set them (internal baselines, external references, control limits), plus guardrails to prevent gaming.
6. Outline how you would present this in a committee deck: what goes on page 1 vs appendix, and what triggers escalation.

Constraints:

• Metrics must be auditable (clear lineage to source systems)
• Must work across inpatient and outpatient settings
• Committee expects action owners and due dates tied to metric thresholds