Interested in hospice business intelligence? Why not skip to a test drive? Check out the sample below of the end-user interface. Be sure to use ‘fullscreen’ mode and click around to interact with the data! (Hint… there are five pages!)
Hospice Business Intelligence and Analytics Tool
Hospice Dashboards for Today’s Agency
We’ve worked with some of the most amazing hospice programs all over the country and most of the major EMR or Patient Management Systems. One of my ongoing pet peeves is the standard ‘canned’ reports that come out of most patient management systems. Not to mention sometimes abysmal financial reports! (See our Financial Statement Services)
But with so much data and so little information, how can leaders make effective decisions? I’ve had conversations with multiple CEOs along the lines of:
We’re generating all these [darn] reports and data, and nobody can make sense of any of it!
Stop relying solely on canned reports!
Fortunately, you’re not alone. This frustration stems from a root cause of two divergent end-user needs: clinical vs. administrative. Also to some degree staff vs. leaders. What lies at the heart of the issue? Patient Management Systems build reports on structured query languages designed to retrieve huge volumes of data from a complex relational database. Consequently, these are great at generating the detailed reports you see littering the network drives and paper-strewn desks at most hospices. Unfortunately, they’re not so great at dashboards and showing the big picture. This is the problem we aim to address with our hospice business intelligence (or ‘BI’) service.
Why? Because healthcare is big data. And to understand big data, you need an even bigger solution. Likewise the solution must handle millions of records across multiple years and summarize, sort and visualize that data. Visualizations allow users to interact and truly see the data on any modern device–computers, tablets and mobile devices. In contrast, without such a tool, a hospice’s data just makes noise.
Introducing HospBI: Our Agile Hospice Business Intelligence Reporting Overlay
Therefore, our solution is exactly like it sounds. Our ‘overlay’ doesn’t replace but rather enhances your existing EMR. Better yet, we’ll enhance and integrate your accounting, payroll and other systems. How do we do this? Similarly to most industry solutions, we port your big data into an intuitive, easy-to-consume format using an ‘Extract, Translate, Load’ or ‘ETL’ process. Furthermore we have surveyed the field and settled on two current industry-leading solutions: Tableau and Microsoft PowerBI. Better yet, because we already use most major patient management systems, we are EMR-agnostic. Simply put, this means we can work within most if not all of the major players out there.
Why EMR-Agnostic?
Almost anyone we talk to agrees: asking your existing EMR vendor write new reports or modify existing ones can be extremely frustrating. In fact, if you could snap your fingers and get exactly what you want from your systems, we wouldn’t need to offer this type of solution!
Why the Focus on Data?
I’ll say this now from my personal observations of hospices across the country: Data is currently one of the largest under-utilized assets hospices have.
Most data-driven CEOs understand the importance of taking ownership of their data. How? By deploying separate report-writers and aggregation processes. Because of the growing demand for wrangling and making sense of all these data points, many large hospice programs even budget for their own “Informatics” department. And you can bet that large healthcare systems ALL have large informatics departments at their disposal for intuitive hospice business intelligence or “BI”.
Unfortunately, most hospices don’t have the resources to hire an FTE, let alone multiple FTEs, just to work on report-writing and data mining. Not to mention, these internal pet projects can become a quagmire in their own right. Projects like this bog down internal IT resources and sometimes just implode altogether.
That’s why we envisioned HospBI. Our solution prioritizes agility and speed. Sometimes what you aren’t doing is just as important as what you are doing. We aren’t trying to make one enterprise-wide system do everything. We aim to show immediate ROI by prioritizing the most pressing needs that have both a strong business justification and end-user buy-in.
Our aim is to put the service back in software-as-a-service.
What Does Business Intelligence as a Service Look Like?
Therefore what we propose, much like our other services, is an ongoing relationship. This partnership puts an ‘Informatics’ department within reach of smaller hospices agencies. We offer our team as an ongoing resource rather than a ‘one-and-done’ software sale. We all share the same end goal: better agency reporting through shared resources at less than the price of an FTE.
While this concept isn’t necessarily new, it has barely made headway in the incredible movement that is hospice If you want to start with a discussion of whether there’s a business case for better reporting and analytics at your agency, get in touch.
P.S. If you’re looking for amazing benchmarking data, then look no further than our partner company, Multi-View and more specifically the MVI Benchmarking tool. This is exactly what you need for industry comparisons. And we consider this a primary but quite different need than the type of internal reporting improvements we aim to solve with our hospice business intelligence service HospBI.