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14sept:09jan.qxd 25/08/2014 11:38 AM Page 11 F O C U S O N B U S I N E S S I N T E L L I G E N C E Summit highlights use of business intelligence in healthcare sector O RLANDO, FLA. – Information Builders (www.information- builders.com), a leading sup- plier of business intelligence (BI), analytics and integration solutions, held its 39th annual summit in June. About 1,500 developers and analysts, along with customers of its WebFOCUS Web- enabled business intelligence (BI) and an- alytics tools, converged to network and learn from one another. The Summit opened with a presenta- tion of Awards of Distinction recognizing innovative use of BI and analytics tools. Winners included: RainTree Oncology Services of San Diego, Calif., a community oncology organization that created an an- alytic platform enabling researchers to fol- low the entire patient journey from diag- nosis to current day, enhancing cancer re- search and promoting best practices for more effective cancer treatment; and Butler Health System, a community health system in western Pennsylvania, which created a WebFOCUS reporting portal and InfoAssist empowering clini- cians and administrators to identify diag- nostic trends within its patient population. Case studies presented at the summit highlighted successful IT projects featur- ing IB’s BI and analytics reporting tools – solutions that give users a greater under- standing of their data. Two healthcare pre- sentations of note, Grand River Hospital (GRH) of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.,and Halifax Health of Daytona Beach, Fla., both of which created a data warehouse to consolidate their clinical information. For its part, Grand River Hospital went from a fragmented, silo-based structure to a centralized data warehouse. “Our hospi- tal uses 68 best-of-breed systems (best in their category). It’s fine for building re- ports within a department, but the systems don’t talk to each other,” said Kathleen Lavoie, director of Health Information Management and Chief Privacy Officer. “We wanted to extract more data, more quickly and manage more requests.” Having a common platform in place would simplify report gathering and help achieve greater efficiency with more accu- rate, timely and meaningful data. “Information Builders (IB) was the right choice because they paid attention to our needs, and their solution provided us the most flexibility,” said Lavoie. In late 2012, the project began by get- ting the first four systems online. About every four months another four systems goes online, and this will continue until all 68 systems are up. “With a data warehouse in place we can answer more questions faster than ever before,” said Lavoie. “It will improve patient care by being able to mine for information that previously didn’t ex- ist. WebFOCUS provides access to data that was previously inaccessible.” Lavoie ended by offering lessons learned. “Before implementing a project it’s important to have a strong governance structure in place. For accountability, the senior leadership team needs to know who makes the decisions and when. It’s also suggested that goals and priorities are set, and to review them often.” She also recom- h t t p : / / w w w. c a n h e a l t h . c o m mended celebrating each success and to learn from each go-live. “Bringing data to- gether and breaking silos brings people and teams together.” Tara Olsen, a BI developer at Halifax Health, highlighted the success of its BRAIN (Business Related Actionable In- formation Network) project, migrating from non-complex to more complex re- porting systems. Halifax Health is a Florida-based group of hospitals. Initially, Halifax ran solely on Meditech, which spits out reporting data very slowly and is limited to what data can be ex- tracted. Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI solution was used to create a data ware- house, putting all of the organization’s data in one place. The data became more easily extracted, analyzed and reports could be run on demand. 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