Business intelligence: managing data complexity with analytics
St. Luke’s
St. Luke’s University Health Network includes nine hospitals and over 300 outpatient sites. Headquartered in Bethlehem, Pa., the non-profit organization serves patients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As part of its longstanding commitment to data-driven management, St. Luke’s wanted to implement a more advanced analytics system that would support its strategic goals in a rapidly changing environment. Those goals include such broad issues as continuous improvement in quality and patient satisfaction, effective cost management and an increase in the organization’s marketshare.
After evaluating more than 10 different analytics solutions, St. Luke’s chose WebFOCUS and Omni-Gen from Information Builders. WebFOCUS is Information Builders’ analytics platform and Omni-Gen is a product for integrating, cleansing and enriching data. After working together to implement those solutions, the two organizations created Omni-HealthData Insights, a set of pre-built analytics tools to empower healthcare organizations with the clinical and operational insights necessary to accelerate the achievement of patient-centered care.
“As a data-driven organization, we needed an efficient, integrated ‘single source of truth’ to remain agile in a changing environment,” says Amanda Mazza, director of analytics and BI at St. Luke’s. “Omni-Gen and WebFOCUS gave us a powerful platform to integrate and present information from data sources throughout the network and across time to provide a comprehensive view of the business.”
St. Luke’s began by identifying top business priorities and then built its data warehouse incrementally, adding data that would address a particular objective. “Our business-driven development approach provided rapid time to value and also ensured that everything in our warehouse adds value,” Mazza explains. “We were able to deliver our first BI applications within four months of kick off and ended up with over 40 data sources and 60 BI applications within 18 months.”
Many of those BI tools are being leveraged in the Omni-HealthData Insights products. In keeping with its goal of tracking and improving customer satisfaction and service, St. Luke’s is now able to analyze patient surveys that assess satisfaction along with electronic medical records that contain comprehensive information about that patient’s stay. Those analyses provide insights into the patient’s overall experience.
Another cluster of analyses supports issues related to quality of care and patient safety. They include a variety of patient safety issues, such as infections, events and outcomes. Those measures allow St. Luke’s to observe both overall trends and individual patient cases and take appropriate action if needed.