ABSTRACT
The board of directors for a hospital system made a significant investment in a medical quality initiative. The medical executive committee recognized the need for a business intelligence (BI) platform for outcomes analytics as an absolute requirement to maintain top performance in mandatory reporting and to support a culture that managed on metrics. In advance of the go-live for the BI platform, the lead analyst and an integration expert were collaborating on the cornerstone project for quality. The immediate result was an ambulatory surgery program that had stellar utilization, quality and physician satisfaction, plus health system-wide support for the expanded BI team and the new platform it was implementing. In order to find the root cause, the BI team actually had to look at the unscrubbed data and recognize that the pattern of data ‘failures’ was itself pointing to the root cause.
