Business Intelligence Will Be Key Application
Business intelligence software can be of extremely high value to healthcare organizations, though the value is greater if hospitals go outside their four walls for implementation assistance, according to a new report by KLAS entitled, “Enterprise Business Intelligence: Does Shopping Outside Healthcare Pay Off?”
Solutions such as those from Dimensional Insight, IBM, Information Builders and SAP can deliver powerful and flexible tools that offer a wide variety of data options, however extensive flexibility often brings with it significant complexity.
“Providers have indicated that many of the industry-agnostic vendor solutions are so highly configurable and complex that organizations without a sizable IT department find the systems unwieldy and sometimes beyond their capacity,” said Lorin Bird, KLAS research director and author of the new report. “For instance, IBM clients who used consultants to implement Cognos scored the solution roughly 10 points higher than those who did it themselves.”
Among the enterprise BI vendors ranked in the KLAS report, Dimensional Insight was rated number one, with an overall KLAS performance score of 84.1 out of 100. Information Builders (80.1) and McKesson (77.6) were second and third, respectively. Other vendors highlighted in the KLAS report include Cerner, IBM, Lawson, Microsoft, Oracle, Precision.BI, SAP, SAS and Siemens.
Among the core hospital vendors, the only company to be ranked in the KLAS report was McKesson, with its Horizon Business Insight product. Cerner has had some success extending its BI capabilities beyond clinical analytics and into the financial realm, but its reach “is still very limited.”
The KLAS report also highlights the role providers expect BI to play in demonstrating meaningful use. Sixty-nine percent of respondents believe BI solutions will play an important or critical role in meaningful use. As one provider said, “BI will play a critical role. Never before have we been so carefully scrutinized, and the BI system helps us provide the information and reports needed to be successful.”
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Rich Temple says
04/30/2010 at 10:53 AMI think this is a great article and I personally can’t say enough about how BI is going to be front-and-center to all manner of both Meaningful Use compliance as well as being able to have the data an organization needs to properly model the impact that various aspects of Health Care Reform are going to have.
If one takes it as a “given” that the real power of EMR/EHR systems lies not only in their ability to aggregate data but in their capability to drive clinical excellence by analyzing and mining data in all sorts of interesting ways. BI is the vehicle that helps bring EMRs/EHRs to this level. It not only helps achieve “Meaningful Use” in the legal sense, but also “meaningful use” in the sense of truly transforming appropriate care protocols to acheive clinical excellence. Through well-implemented BI systems, organizations will have all sorts of capacity to do “what’s wrong with this picture” analyses and will be able to zero in on exact problem areas and address them effectively.