Panorama Case Studies

Company: Advocate Health Care

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Leading Health Care Provider Utilizes Robust BI Solution to Manage Key Performance Indicators and Enhanced Drilled Down Data

Company Overview

Advocate Health Care, one of the nation's top 10 health care provider, based on clinical performance, is the largest health system in Illinois and one of the largest health care providers in the Midwest. Advocate operates more than 250 sites of care, including ten acute care hospitals, two integrated children's hospitals, five Level I trauma centers (the state's highest designation in trauma care), two Level II trauma centers, one of the area's largest home health care companies and one of the region's largest medical groups. Advocate Health Care trains more primary care physicians and residents at its three major teaching hospitals than any other health system in the state.

Business Challenge

The Advocate Health Care Center for Health Information Services (CHIS) needed an integrated business intelligence solution to help support the tracking and fulfillment of company-wide key performance indicators. In support of using data analytics to identify priorities for action and drive improvements within Advocate Health Care, CHIS had 4 primary services offerings:

• Management and building of an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)
• Business intelligence/analytics of data, and measurement of key organizational processes
• Public data provided to proper government agencies as part of the broader mandatory healthcare regulations
• Oversight of organizational coding processes

“We needed integrated analytics to help us gain deeper knowledge about our processes and outcomes,” said Tina Esposito, Director Center for Health Information Services. “For example, the accessibility of patient satisfaction data by site, service line, and unit has helped managers zero in on areas of opportunity.” 

There was a need for the ability to drill down information in a more efficient manner. Previously, analysts were pouring through data in order to find just a small subset of information. This intensive searching dragged down efficiency. 

Solution

Advocate Health Care chose Panorama’s BI Solution suite for its compatibility to organization’s electronic data systems and ease of use, meeting the information needs of individuals with varying degrees of knowledge and expertise in data analytics. The firm became a customer in 2006, running Panorama on a simple architecture of Windows XP, with SQL Server on the back end.

With about 800 consistent users, Advocate Health Care needed a BI solution that could meet the needs of individuals with varying degrees of knowledge requirements and expertise. The front-end users are segmented into 80 to 100 power users that use all of the system’s data manipulation capabilities and the remaining users that require access to default pages to see hard numbers.

The CHIS division provides end users with access to Panorama’s BI Solution which then allows users to look at data in a multi-dimensional view, allowing them to extract new insights into drivers of key processes. It is incorporated directly into the base architecture of Advocate Health Care’s systems, providing a seamless platform.

This BI platform is segregated into two distinct but interrelated enrollment environments. The public enrollment provides access to all of the 33,000 Advocate Health Care users who wish to broaden their knowledge about reports, scorecards, and other information that does not provide patient-level data.  The ability to provide this broad enrollment has supported a culture of transparency.  Nearly all company employees use scorecards to gauge key performance indicators for the company, by actively using Panorama’s BI solution.

The second enrollment is a secured environment with data being sourced directly from Advocate systems. This involves a slightly different architecture that enables more patient-level reporting and data analysis.

Results

Drilled Down Analytics

Advocate Health Care’s users utilize Panorama to drill down into data to evaluate the key result areas of Health Outcomes and Patient Satisfaction.  This supports corporate-wide initiatives on topics such as readmissions, computerized physician order entry (CPOE), and length of stay.

Users are presented with very interactive reports which are sourced from the Panorama driven data cube. They are presented with a summary scorecard and can easily click for more details. Each hospital is tabbed into its own dataset and users can manipulate data as needed, easily saving to their briefing book for further review.

“We can now offer data in a transformative way, moving from just looking at numbers to gaining a real understanding about the meaning and implications of those numbers said Esposito. 

Managing the Population Set and Data Sources

With its integration capabilities, users can dynamically alter the patient population sets to the segments they actually need, instead of spending time looking at charts. There is also a broad flattening of the data within Advocate Health Care’s EDW. Data comes into the EDW from multiple sources including HIS systems, Lawson ERP, and external benchmarking systems. “Everything comes into the one platform at the EDW, which really benefits the user by providing a simplified environment,” said Padmini Mandavalli, Manager from EDW. “This integration moved us way beyond creating reports one-by-one and trying to merge them into Excel. Numerous aspects of patient care are together, providing a more complete multidimensional view.”

Solution Highlights

• Managers can quickly access self-service data to impact outcomes
• Reporting completed in minutes to allow flexible and informed decision making
• Standardization of templates allows fast and easy customization
• Multi-dimensional data views provide greater context into the meaning of reports
• Users can quickly drill down to the right subset of data
• The Panorama enabled EDW seamlessly integrates disparate data from multiple sources

 

 

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