We at AristaCare Health Services in New Jersey just signed a significant deal with ABS System Consultants, based in Toronto, CA, for what is going to be an extremely transformational business intelligence solution for our long-term care system. The tool is called Metrics3D and is going to render information in profoundly new and useful ways across our organization.
I have blogged in the past about just how important a role I think business intelligence (BI) plays in being an engine for accountability and transparency across all areas of an organization. It has been said for a long time that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” but the ability to make the “measuring” jump off the page at you – showing you just what you need with aesthetically-pleasing graphs or charts and drill-down to detail capabilities – is something new and extremely exciting.
To give you a quick sense of what we want to do as part of our “phase one” with the Metrics3D tool, we want to automate our comprehensive financial reporting to render the data we require on personalized “dashboards”, the composition of which will vary based on job role and on the individual seeking the data. We will also have a nearly real-time census tracking and trending tool and a very easy mechanism to identify referral patterns and changes in referral patterns from hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers. We are also going to be doing a deep mine of our clinical data including detailed analysis of drug costs and comparisons of different treatment patterns to assess both efficacy and efficiency.
In our new world, we are looking forward to being able to send out automatic alerts to responsible people when key statistics which go outside thresholds that we define, so that they can nip issues in the bud before they become major issues. Leaders will be able to see the extent of variances through “traffic-light” color-coding and will have easy-to-access windows into all aspects of their respective operations.
I plan to furnish periodic updates through this blog on how this project is going.
