Business intelligence: managing data complexity with analytics

Metrics

A hospital network balanced scorecard includes more than 30 KPIs that reflect a wide range of measures for specific departments, functions and services. They allow assessment of factors such as quality of service, financial elements and growth trends across different types of services, populations and medical issues. Physician practice performance metrics are also collected and evaluated.

Finally, a set of population health metrics is obtained related to cost and quality of care. The hospital staff can then work to optimize services, identify high-risk patients and conduct outreach to mitigate those risks to provide the right combinations of services to achieve the best outcome.

Those and other tools are used by people at all levels across St. Luke’s. “The BI applications provide easy self-service access to commonly used data for users across the network. Analyst time is then freed up for ad hoc and exploratory analysis, which is made more efficient by the robust, integrated data foundation in the data warehouse. We are now able to integrate, analyze and distribute our data much more efficiently, which moves us steadily toward our strategic goals,” Mazza concludes.

Given the complexity of today’s data, centralized management and governance are important, according to Jake Freivald, VP for product marketing at Information Builders. “Despite the move toward self-service tools for individual users, one of the challenges is that people don’t always understand the data well enough to develop a dashboard that makes sense of it,” he says. “So, we are seeing a swing back toward a more controlled environment.”

Effective self-service requires that more work be done behind the scenes to make the data consumable. “A good data consumer experience enables the user to get the information they need in context, without being an expert in statistics or analytics,” Freivald explains. “They should be able to interact with the information to get the answers they need.”

That ability allows organizations to determine the underlying cause of events and take action. When BI is pervasive, it becomes part of the mainstream and an integral part of each worker’s job.