FlashPoint Newsletter

View online: tdwi.org/flashpoint


		May 6, 2010	ANNOUNCEMENTS Submissions for the next Business Intelligence Journal are due May 21. Submission guidelines. New TDWI Best Practices Report: Unified Data Management: A Collaboration of Data Disciplines and Business Strategies CONTENTS BI in Healthcare: The Time for Fundamental Redesign Has Never Been Better Adoption of BW Mistake: Setting Ineffective Goals See what's current in TDWI Education, Research, Webinars, and Marketplace
	BI in Healthcare: The Time for Fundamental Redesign Has Never Been Better Carol Newcomb Baseline Consulting
Topics: Business Intelligence, Data Governance, Data Quality The federal government is providing billions of dollars in ARRA grants to healthcare organizations to automate and integrate information systems. Hurrah to that! Before you leap, though, consider the awesome opportunity you have to design a sound, integrated, and reliable information enterprise based on BI best practices. Funding is available. You don’t need to repeat the blunders that got healthcare into the technology mess it’s in today. If you do it correctly--and now is the moment--would you add yet another application on top of the existing patchwork quilt of technologies currently driving your operations? Even if electronic health record (EHR) vendors claim their systems are extensive and integrated on one platform across registration, billing, pharmacy, inpatient, surgery, ER, ambulatory, and so on, ask yourself how difficult it will be to report on Sally Jones’s total cost of care if her hip implant goes bad; whether Mr. White’s infection while he was in the ICU was due to an allergy, poor hand-washing, or unclean IV tubing; or if the pharmacy’s mistake in distributing Coumadin in the wrong dosage contributed to $400,000 overruns in the cost of Mrs. Brown’s preapproved hospital visit. How many different places will you need to go for answers to these questions? How many different hardware and software platforms does the information reside on? When you’re through with your EHR implementation, how much work will it take to generate meaningful reports at an enterprise level? These are the challenges that most healthcare organizations face today, and they call for a strategic and deliberate plan to do BI right. Let’s talk about best practices in BI, starting with the typical healthcare organization’s technical infrastructure. How many interfaces does your IT department maintain? How much time is invested in “keeping the lights on”? How many standalone applications do you have under one organizational roof? Does anybody maintain an inventory or portfolio of the different systems? Do you have an enterprise server? How many programming languages and DBAs do you employ? Can anybody in your organization draw one logical data model that represents the entire business? Who maintains a centralized physical data model? How many physical data models exist? In how many different places are business requirements, data requirements, or functional requirements stored? Do you have a data dictionary that end users can access? Do you have agreed-upon definitions? How do you handle master data such as patients, physicians, employees, service codes, and diagnosis and billing codes? Do you have any master data hubs? Do you have any data governance efforts under way to resolve conflicts in data usage and develop centralized and enforceable policies for visibility, data capture, and data sharing? What types of systematic data quality activities are under way to root out data issues? How are issues escalated and resolved within the organization? BI best practices recommend that the fundamental approach to managing data and the delivery of data within your healthcare organization starts at the enterprise level. If you need to “roll data up” instead of drilling down to detail, this is your first clue that your strategy needs to change. Solid BI infrastructure can provide the following: Reduced time to collect, scrub, and deliver data for quality assurance, compliance and accreditation activities, billing, credentialing, clinical reporting, and more Fewer reports to manage staffing, productivity, purchasing, and recruitment activities Repeatable, reliable results Trusted data Faster resolution of data quality and governance issues A scalable, organized solution for a multitude of data provisioning demands Enterprise-level data to support both operational and strategic decision making If you think this investment in BI will take too long, derail other systems development or implementation activities, or even cost too much, think again. We are all guilty of short-term thinking, and patching things together only results in patchwork systems that are messy and expensive to maintain. Five years down the road, wouldn’t you rather say, “We spent $5 million on laying the groundwork for a scalable enterprise platform that integrates finance, human resources, legal, clinical and administrative reporting needs with data that we understand and that we can trust” instead of “We spent $5 million on our current EHR, and now we have two hospitals that use it but we still need to bring three more on board”? There may never be a better opportunity to prepare for the future. Carol Newcomb is a senior consultant for Baseline Consulting. She has an MHSA from the University of Michigan and extensive background in health services data management. Her current work is focused on data governance in a variety of industries. Highlight of key findings from TDWI's wide variety of research Adoption of BW To find out why the majority of SAP customers are committed to BW, TDWI’s survey asked: “Why did you choose SAP NetWeaver BI?” (See Figure 15.) The leading reason for adopting NetWeaver BI is that it’s bundled with enterprise software (59% of respondents), followed by a standardization strategy (55%). This isn’t surprising, because application acquisition strategies that make SAP applications the corporate standard often have a domino effect of making SAP products the standard for BI and DW, too. These reasons for adopting BW are pervasive, but not exactly flattering for BW, as are more positive reasons, like strong business value (33%), prebuilt data model (32%), fit requirements (31%), and less costly than new development (30%). More compliments came from respondents who selected “other” and praised BW for being “easy to implement” and “easy to integrate with existing applications.” (Click to enlarge) Source: Business Intelligence Solutions for SAP (TDWI Best Practices Report, Q4 2007). Click here to access the report. FlashPoint Rx prescribes a "Mistake to Avoid" for business intelligence and data warehousing professionals. Mistake: Setting Ineffective Goals By Mark Peco Business managers use goals to motivate and influence the behavior of their staff to drive organizations to produce desired outcomes. Senior management teams define high-level organizational goals in response to external drivers that affect the organization (as opportunities to be pursued or as threats to be defended against). Strategic goals define the outcomes that an organization wants to achieve. Tactical goals define what must be achieved operationally at the process or project level to attain the strategic goals. Well-defined organizational goals cascade from a few strategic goals into many tactical goals that can be achieved operationally. Defining an effective set of goals that links operational initiatives to strategic outcomes is a key element in defining an overall program structure. If a program is designed and launched without a foundation of clear and effective goals, there can be no basis or benchmark to evaluate its success. Potential program value can be evaluated only within the context of well-defined goals that link tactics with strategies. In the absence of meaningful value assessments, it is unclear how the program would be justified or allowed to continue operating. If the goals defined for the program do not relate to any of the organization’s strategic goals, if their attainment cannot be measured, or if they are simply not achievable, then they will be ineffective in defining, designing, and managing the program. Source: Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing Program Management (Q2 2007). Click here to access the publication.