More than half of all healthcare organizations have yet to implement business intelligence (BI) system, despite their acknowledged benefits, according to a survey from the Hanover, Md.-based TEKsystems’ healthcare services division.
The survey represents views of more than 250 healthcare professionals, including senior-level health IT executives and medical staff such as CIOs, directors of information systems and clinical informatics, physicians, and chief nursing officers. Respondents represent a wide cross section of healthcare organizations including hospitals, medical clinics, ambulatory care centers and integrated delivery systems.
Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed indicated that their organization has not implemented a BI system. This number includes the 36 percent that simply do not have a BI system, 15 percent that do not have such a system but plan to implement one in the next 12-24 months, and seven percent that have a BI system but have yet to implement it. Forty-two percent of respondents have implemented and are currently using a BI system.
Additionally, nearly three-quarters of respondents indicated they expected a BI system to be widely used in finance (76 percent), operations (75 percent), and clinical care (71 percent). Interestingly, about half (53 percent), expected it to be widely used for compliance.
Other key highlights from the survey include:
- More than one-third of respondents report that data complexity poses the greatest challenge. Thirty-four percent indicated that data complexity was the top obstacle to reaching their goal of implementing a BI system. Within the data complexity category, respondents identified the most painful aspects as lack of a standardized data structure (34 percent), analysis requirements (24 percent), and disparate systems and lack of interoperability (23 percent).
- Thirty-two percent of respondents believe that the biggest threat to implementation is a lack of skills and resources. Of this group, the reasons most mentioned for this deficiency include lack of internal and external resources and experts (45 percent), commitment of resources to other technology programs (25 percent) and lack of strategic workforce planning expertise (12 percent).
