Critical Success Factors to Facilitate BI in Healthcare Organizations
Key mechanisms that drive the success of business
intelligence (BI) and analytics are strategy, people, and technology. Strategy
and goals should be the primary consideration when investing in new technology.
The leadership, analytical, and other key members of the organization should
all have input on how certain technology is used and what needs to be done to
promote BI and analytical excellence. According to Strome (2013) there are 5
components that healthcare organizations (HCO) require in order to become
analytical including:
·
Strategy
·
Leadership and commitment
·
Focus
·
Agility
·
Teamwork (Strome, 2013)
The approach to becoming more efficient in healthcare
requires that we leverage current technology or invest in products that will
benefit the HCO. One common issue with organizations is that they fail to
develop a strategy and end up investing in unnecessary software. My
organization has taken on the best of breed approach and invested in multiple
systems that have come at an expense to transparency and interoperability.
Currently we use multiple systems for our revenue cycle including: Allscripts Sunrise
Patient Financial Manager (SPFM) and Payment Integrity Compass (PIC), which
essentially perform the same functions. The issue with having two systems is
that they both are used differently within the patient accounts department. This
causes trouble for our analytics team who have to pull the data to be presented
to leadership. For example, our denials are primarily loaded into PIC, however,
in many cases manual denials can be missed because someone is working with the
specific account in our SPFM system. This makes it confusing when trying to
pull data for denials analysis. A major issue we have is denials and being able
to track denial trends helps us determine what processes need to be improved.
Although this is considered a reactionary approach it is fundamental that we
have the data needed to validate what area of our revenue cycle needs improvement.
In order to have a sustainable enterprise, organizations must have a
sustainable infrastructure with consistent processes and workflows. This helps
analysts understand the data and be able to provide information for process
improvements. Moreover, having a well-developed infrastructure helps with being
agile to changes that need to be made weekly rather than yearly (Strome, 2013).
Having a well-rounded team from different backgrounds also
improves success factors in BI and analytics initiatives of an organization.
Having a diverse culture of analysts with innovative mindsets and natural
curiosity is what drives performance improvement initiatives. Teams who are
consistently challenging processes and technologically savvy will naturally
cater to the needs of the organization. Strome (2013) suggests that these are among
the qualities needed to build effective analytics team. The diverse culture
brings powerful insights from many backgrounds that can understand the data and
will help identify, implement, and evaluate improvement opportunities more
efficiently and effectively.
Reference:
Strome, T. (2013). Becoming an analytical healthcare
organization. Healthcare Analytics for Quality and Performance Improvement.
pp.205-216. Hobroken, NJ: Jon Wiley & Sons, inc