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



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