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How Business Intelligence (BI) Solution helps Health Information Technology (HIT) solutions companies achieve visibility on their solution usage
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Introduction
Information Technology continues to empower the Healthcare Industry. By leveraging technology,
Healthcare industry looks forward to improve quality of services, reduce expenses and increase
operational efficiencies. Healthcare industry requires solutions that are robust, flexible and highly
resilient for life-critical situations.
In recent times, healthcare Business Intelligence (BI) adoption is on the rise. BI consolidates multiple
systems, applications and databases. These multiple systems, applications and databases serve as
data sources for BI. Data is gathered from multiple sources. Business intelligence tools consume the
gathered data and perform a thorough real-time analysis. BI tools also transform the data accordingly
to provide vital business information and insights. Healthcare organizations with vital business
information make informed and effective decisions.
Healthcare organizations utilize BI to be efficient, improve quality of services, and provide
operational excellence. Healthcare IT Solution Providers (HIT) embrace BI to offer customers with
state-of-art, class leading, and enterprise grade Healthcare solutions.
Quick Question: Now, how are health solution providers actually making use of Business intelligence
(BI) tools?
For example, consider temperature control application. The application controls and monitors
temperature based on sensors. Internal sensors monitor the room temperature. External sensors
monitor the outside temperature. In terms of BI, the application is a primary data source for the
solution provider. Running in the back-end is another application that gathers all the data and
consumes the data to generate structured reports. The structured reports contain information about
different parameters of the application. Thereafter reports will be uploaded to solution provider
cloud. The solution provider performs a thorough real-time analysis and data manipulation by using
the report. The results from the analysis will be utilized to further enhance the solution.
Visibility on Solution Usage: Business Intelligence for that BI tools can extract, transform and manipulate data to analyse various parameters of an
application/solution. Business intelligence supplies solution provider with the information on the
following parameters.
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Evaluate application performance and behaviour
Business intelligence reporting contains real-time information about various parameters of the
application. Each parameter offers insight on individual elements/layers present in the application.
The analysis of application performance leads to elimination of bottlenecks present in the
application.
Constant health monitoring
Business intelligence helps in constant health monitoring of the application. For example, In the
event of application becoming non-responsive, an email alert is instantly triggered to the solution
provider to investigate the root cause of the problem. BI tools can be customized to generate
detailed event journal files containing end-to-end information about error messages.
Back-end functionality
The back-end functionality performance parameters of the application such as
Processing time
Business work flows
Databases
Server performance
Responsiveness of the applications
All the above mentioned back-end parameters can be monitored by BI. Back-end monitoring provides
valuable insights for further application development.
Usage patterns
By understanding usage patterns, solution providers get to know about most commonly used
features of the applications. Usage patterns helps organizations to learn more about the potential
use cases of the application under various environments.
Applications work loads
BI tools are instrumental in letting solution providers know the applications behaviour under
different workloads. For example, determine the performance of medical billing application during
peak hours in a hospital.
Another example, in each healthcare organization, the application might run on different hardware
resources. The solution provider can utilize BI to assess the performance of application under
different hardware resources. Come up with application performance metrics report to further
optimize the application for hardware. The same performance metrics report can be turned into
hardware guide for prospective customers.
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Gaining Visibility on solution usage offers the following benefits
Empowers solution
Provides greater and meaningful insights to application/solution performance
In-depth application analysis
Powerful reporting and KPIs
Image reference:
https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/blog/2013/08/15/celebrating-business-
innovation-at-the-cio-100-symposium
Next Steps: After Gaining Visibility on Solution Usage
Healthcare industry is slowly and steadily embracing state-of-art technology solutions. From patient
billing to critical life-saving equipment, technology is involved everywhere. With BI in action,
Healthcare organizations are able to streamline their operations and readily offer services, typically
patients require. Solution providers (HIT) are evolving as healthcare organizations adopt technology.
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A recent study conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and Verizon and featured in a
“epte er I for atio Week Health are arti le showed, O ly per e t of health are organizations proactively seek to get first-mover advantage, compared with 36 percent that buy new
technology after others have proven its benefits and 35 percent that wait until something has become
well esta lished.
http://www.clinigence.com/blog/2014/9/19/early-healthcare-technology-adopters-thrive-says-
harvard-business-review
BI tools provide all the vital information and statistics of solution usage. Based on which the solution
provider can do the following.
Refine existing features
After gaining insights on the solution usage, a lot of parameters and features can optimized. For
example, most of the solutions, allow customer to customize few parameters to an extent. BI can
reflect those customizations to the solution provider. These customized features, if found very useful,
solution provider can offer the same feature with better optimization in the next application update.
For example, in billing system, the customer adds an additional column of information and manually
updates it. The solution provider can easily automate the information present in this column by
defining business logic.
Most commonly accessed features/options can be easily recognized in BI reports. It can be visualized
based on number of clicks per page/ time spent on the page. These features can be thoroughly
refined and optimized to make it more user-friendly.
Introduce new features
Based on solution usage patterns, solution provider can explore the possibilities of offering additional
features in the solution. For example, in electronic medical records (EMR), offer the additional
feature of knowing illness patterns of patients based on the different seasons of year. Provide new
templates and business workflows based on solution usage.
Healthcare Integration
With BI, evaluate the kind of integrated environments healthcare organizations require today. For
example, BI tools can provide information about most commonly used together medical devices,
working in tandem. Another example can be of integrating billing system, medical inventory and its
supply chain management. By integrating, solution providers can create completely centralized
environments to improve healthcare services.
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Understanding solution usage patterns allows HIT to explore the possibilities of introducing new
solutions and products.
Conclusion Business Intelligence is a very powerful tools as they provide rich information pertaining to the
application performance and its various other parameters. The information can very well be utilized
to further customize and enhance the application to perfectly suit the customer requirements. It has
become a best practice for organizations to rely on business data, while making game-changing
decisions and organizational restructuring.
Image reference: http://searchhealthit.techtarget.com/report/Analytics-Moving-health-care-forward
With BI, Healthcare solutions can readily adapt to rapidly changing healthcare industry. BI also helps
healthcare organizations to be compliant and audit ready. With the advent of cloud, solution
providers can look forward to offer cost-effective and highly flexible healthcare solutions.
)TCube’s Business )ntelligence B) Framework. Established in 2003, ITCube is a Software Services and Product company. We specialize in offering
Software Development, Product Engineering, Custom Application Development, Application Support
Services and BI Solutions on Technology Platforms like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft .NET,
Microsoft Dynamics AX and JAVA.
ITCube has developed a Business Intelligence framework BI Container built on Microsoft ASP .NET. BI
Container is a Dashboard framework along with admin features.
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