Topic 11 Conclusion

I did my research on healthcare, a lot of companies have implemented Business intelligence software and an example is NaphCare Inc. NaphCare Incorporated is a small to medium size company with about 24 locations in the United States. The company employs approximately 800 people to provide healthcare to inmates in prison.

In the correctional facilities, healthcare is very expensive so cutting down costs is essential. This is why NaphCare employed a business intelligence project to help maintain costs and quality. The company uses Microsoft SQL server database and PHP for their Business Intelligence tools and is currently looking at buying new software (Cognos). As far as information gathering and reporting, all the sites share a common database and as such each individual institution can access periodic reports and also generate one when requested by a service administrator.

Implementing Business intelligence has helped NaphCare a lot because it ensures that all their processes and requests are efficient. Even though they have 24 different locations, because of a centralized BI system, nurses can get access to real time patient information. Without the BI system, patients had to wait to be referred to a healthcare administrator when they first entered the correctional facility. With this new BI system, there is no wait time because patient medical administration record can be entered as soon it is ordered. Cost and minimizing errors stands out as the greatest thing in terms of having BI software and finally, the ability to monitor stocks and orders in real-time

Topic 10 BI Software

To explain how data is populated in the data warehouse, I read an article "Examining the use of Business Intelligence in Healthcare Management" by Troy Felix, Mansi Saha, Kakoli, Dyni Brookshire and Victoria Duncan. This article compares four different companies (Cleveland Clinic, NaphCare incorporated, Harris County Hospital District & The Christus Healthcare System) and defines business intelligence as the architecture, tools, databases, applications and methodologies that help a business to acquire a better understanding of its operations. As I explained in my previous blog, Cleveland clinic gathers its intelligence from databases of its various departments because each one of those departments has its own self-contained processes, systems and databases and so they had to bridge the gap between these different silos. Cleveland clinic populates its data warehouse with the aid of softwares like WebSphere (WebSphere Application Server), LDAP directory, IBM DB2 database and other configuration tools.

Also, for their data mining and data-warehousing Cleveland clinic believes that visualization allows the clinic to identify similarities and trends among large groups of data. As such, they use a multidimensional visual data system to analyze their different data sources some of which are clinical, phenotypic, and demographic etc.  To gather reports NaphCare uses Tech Care software which helps increase the efficiency and accountability of the healthcare program. This software also serves as a check for the company to follow the highest standard of care.  At Cleveland clinic, because of accurate reports and data warehousing; a physician can now extract the ordering information from patients for whom a blood hemoglobin level was ordered through the organizations data system. With Christus Health, the technical aspects of data warehousing has led to better allocation of resources and better care delivery.

Topic 9 Business Process

A business process is the approach taken by companies which is focused on aligning all aspects of the organization with the wants and needs of clients. This process is often visualized with a flowchart as a series of activities with decision points and this approach promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation flexibility and integration with technology.

According to NexDimensions (leading App producer), “Business Intelligence refers to the skills, processes, applications, technologies and practices used to support decision making”. Business Intelligence solutions automate the process of extracting data and producing reports thereby eliminating all of the manual effort of IT and the people creating the reports from raw data. This solution produces reports using the data that has been automatically extracted from a database to produce accurate reports. Companies can only decide what new products to carry or drop based on the accurate data gathered from these reports.

In health care, data security is very important because you wouldn't want unauthorized persons getting a hold of other patients data and Business intelligence solutions help protect this data so that only people who need to that information see it and any information sent is through the companies intranet and employees have access to only the data required to do their specific jobs.  Even though these gadgets and security measures play a major role in the healthcare business, the key role that stands out is Human resource planning. This is key because being able to recruit, manage and retain able personnel helps the industry flourish. Through human resource management there's is better promotion and collaboration among employees, employees feel safer due to a healthy work environment.

In conclusion, businesses and industries cannot do without business intelligence and business processes. They are the backbone of every organization that is prospering or would want to grow.

Links to articles I read can be found here:

http://www.nexdimension.net/products/business-intelligence.php

http://businessintelligence.com/do-you-need-business-intelligence/
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dmndhelp/v6rxmx/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.wbit.help.bpel.ui.doc/concepts/cunder.html

Topic 8 Business Strategies

Cleveland clinic is a non-profit medical center that was founded in 1921. It is one of the few clinics that integrates clinical and hospital care with education. As part the clinic's vision they decided to embark on a project that would strengthen their clinical, research and business decision making by leveraging its patient information. Just because the clinic is huge, it is very much compartmentalized and with this information wasn't flowing through each department as it was supposed to. Even though they had lots of data to be able to predict underlying disease causing patterns, the silo system in place was hindering their progress. They needed a way to pull together their huge patient data to unlock its core value and develop it into a core process so they decided employ IBM consulting services to roll-out the IBM Healthcare and life Sciences Clinical Genomics solution to access analyze and share data where it is at.

As a solution to Cleveland Clinic's problem, IBM selected its WebSphere Portal Enable for Multiplatforms. What this did was;  it improved the ability of the clinic to predict, diagnose and treat disease via real time patient information, it gave the clinic the ability to optimize operational decisions while maintaining strong outcomes and finally it reduced the time required to identify qualified research recruits from months to minutes. 

From this article, I have come to learn maintaining a company's reputation isn't necessarily an easy task. I have also learned that silo systems restricts information sharing and doesn't help in the growth of a company.

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/imc/pdf/cs-cleveland-clinic-092605.pdf

www.clevelandclinic.org