In today's healthcare environment, organizations are swimming in an ever-deeper pool of data yet many lack the technology to use this data as valuable information. As regulations change and the amount of data increases, organizations are turning to business intelligence (BI) solutions to harness data for precise decision-making to help improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and ensure their organization's future.
Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions are built on familiar, intuitive Microsoft applications so that every employee - not just trained specialists - can easily access relevant, actionable information, create reports and dashboards, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), collaborate with peers and colleagues, and make well-informed decisions. Plus, you can rely on proven technology from Microsoft to help make your solution easy to manage and support.
Microsoft provides a fully-integrated BI platform, infrastructure, and applications to help you access and understand the personal, team, and organizational information that affects business performance.
Microsoft delivers business intelligence through three layers:
Performance management
Quickly and easily create dashboards and scorecards with Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet software, so that everyone can align with departmental and organizational goals. Automate the supporting processes with Microsoft Office Visio drawing and diagramming software. And manage the workflow with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. SharePoint Server also lets you share reports and analysis, and collaborate with colleagues.
Reporting and analysis
Equip your people with reporting and analysis tools and technologies that will help capture the structured and unstructured information they use to make decisions. Easily create reports and perform analysis with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services. Pivot functionality and slice and dice lets you look at data different ways and drill down to explore trends. Of course, users can always count on Excel to manipulate data and create reports.
Data warehouse
Get insight into the data you need through an integrated, centrally managed, and trusted data source. Microsoft offers an enterprise-ready BI platform with SQL Server. Many healthcare organizations are using SQL Server for data and records management, and so are already familiar with how easy it is to manage. You can combine data from multiple sources into one location and provide access to information from a unified, trusted database, using SQL Server as your data warehouse.
The Microsoft business intelligence approach
Microsoft BI solutions provide a cost-effective way to provide organization-wide access to information using familiar tools that are flexible enough to meet a wide range of needs, across a wide range of users. By utilizing many of the existing tools you have in place today, Microsoft BI can help reduce the incremental cost for new solutions and help speed up delivery time. Users at all levels can create reports and perform analysis, and information and communications (ICT) staff resources are freed up to work on other critical infrastructure needs.
In the past, BI has been only for the few specialists who have been trained to query and format data. It's time to think bigger about BI. Whether at the personal, departmental, or organization level, Microsoft BI provides all workers with easy access to relevant, actionable information, when they need it.
Organizational BI
Use to achieve larger strategic initiatives, such as operating margin, return on investment on strategic investments, and quality of care goals. SharePoint Server makes it easy to share and collaborate on progress toward organizational goals.
Departmental BI
Help your people work more effectively as a team, ensuring the goals of the department are met. Workers can create reports and dashboards in Excel that display key process metrics.
Personal BI
Helps workers in tasks they do every day. Using the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client, workers can manage individual goals and tasks, while Visio can help workers develop and manage processes.
Specific examples of BI in the healthcare environment
Service line analysis and reporting
You can also use Microsoft BI tools to conduct service line analysis and reporting. Analyzing and reporting on service lines allows your organization to accurately - and in real time - understand service inefficiencies, and improve the coordination of services, patient satisfaction, and the quality of care. Health organizations typically track and analyze performance metrics for health and wellness service lines (for example, weight management and nutrition), women and infant services, traditional lines of service (for example, musculoskeletal, orthopedic, and emergency), and chronic disease lines (for example, cancer, heart, and diabetes).
By using Microsoft BI, you can analyze and report on service lines to help improve the quality and efficiency of medical service delivery, align with organizational goals, reduce costs, and improve margins.
Health and wellness service line management
Microsoft BI can help you manage performance at all levels of operation, including the health and wellness service line. This service line includes wide-ranging programs such as those that build awareness about disease prevention and healthy lifestyles or that help individuals cope with specific health and well-being issues. Within the health and wellness service line, organizations look to improve disease prevention testing and adherence, analyze demographic information and trends to align service offerings, analyze recurring episodes of illness, and track immunization rates and disease outbreaks. Effective tracking and analysis of these indicators can help healthcare organizations reduce episodes of illness, improve outcomes, reduce costs, and improve patient satisfaction.
Microsoft BI can help you better understand and track trends in health issues and health programs with easy access to real-time information. Healthcare professionals can drill down into the data to explore details behind the trends, allowing them to quickly respond and to adjust efforts.
Balanced Scorecard
Healthcare organizations are motivated to make performance management a part of their culture. Microsoft BI tools help you use the Balanced Scorecard as a strategic management system to track organizational performance across financial, clinical, business process, and learning and growth measures. Once performance metrics are set, you can identify the key drivers, or desired outcomes, and then define indicators to gauge progress.
By using Microsoft BI to manage to key indicators, you can achieve consistent strategy execution and monitor performance. By tracking patient satisfaction, quality of care, financial performance, and enhanced learning and growth metrics, the Balanced Scorecard can provide a complete view of the organization. Microsoft BI enables you to link together all the key elements of the Balanced Scorecard with easy-to-use templates and a single interface for viewing KPIs. Decision-makers can track operational performance drivers and analyze financial, operational, and clinical KPIs across the organization with customizable scorecards for groups and individuals.
