Gaining true business insight requires more than smart technology investments in individual systems. Rather, it comes from shaping those technologies into a cohesive whole.
"Nowhere is this more true than in today's healthcare environment, where executives, managers, doctors and distributed teams need accurate, up-to-date information for decision-making faster than ever before," says Corey Springett, business development manager, SAS Institute, SA.
For healthcare managers, the availability of integrated enterprise information is a top priority. This creates a challenge for IT leaders to deliver complete, accurate information to an increasing number of users in a variety of formats -without raising operational costs.
"Unfortunately, many of the common approaches to meeting this challenge have major shortcomings," says Springett. "For example, having IT employees process all queries creates expensive and time-consuming bottlenecks. Using multiple point solutions creates confusing and unreliable results, since business intelligence is usually not based on a common model of corporate data or on corporate standards for surfacing information."
Even self-service tools that attempt to provide a full range of business intelligence capabilities, such as managed reporting, ad hoc queries and OLAP, are generally too complex for most users but not robust enough for experts. Consequently, IT groups often end up spending a great deal of time training users and replicating data to provide information to a variety of customers.
"Healthcare providers need to meet the growing information needs of healthcare providers and overcome the inefficiencies of existing options," says Springett. "To achieve this, IT departments in healthcare settings need an out-of-the-box, centralised, integrated business intelligence environment that handles all types of enterprise information. They need a solution with ad hoc query and reporting capabilities for a variety of user types."
The ideal business intelligence solution supports organisational standards and uses common metadata while still empowering individuals to decide how they access, analyse, view and share information.
It should also provide a powerful development environment, seamless integration with existing, familiar clinical and business applications and a secure portal framework that makes it easy to distribute information throughout the organisation.
"It should empower users by giving them access to information in the format they need, when they need it. It should also provide an integrated, enterprise architecture with targeted user interfaces to allow information access, analysis and reporting for different types of users," says Springett.
With resources already spread too thin, many hospital IT departments are finding that the growing demand for business intelligence is overloading an already full priority list.
A sophisticated business intelligence solution gives valuable time back to IT departments by giving more control to users, who will no longer need to rely on the IT staff to generate reports.
SAS Business Intelligence provides a full range of client interfaces to suit all user types and its architecture enables IT to use any combination of clients in designing its business intelligence infrastructure. It frees IT resources from the non-stop stream of ad hoc requests, enabling service quality improvement. At the same time, IT retains control over the consistency and reliability of the data.
The solution creates a collaborative domain that links previously isolated specialists in care delivery, statistics, finance, marketing and operations to give the whole user community access to company-standard analytic routines and reporting templates. It helps conserve resources, and reports quickly and accurately on dependable information.
"In effect, SAS Business Intelligence enables the IT organisation to leverage existing data and infrastructure to support effective decision making," says Springett.
The solution is one of five integrated elements comprising the SAS Intelligence Value Chain. Others include SAS Intelligent Storage, and SAS Enterprise, Transform and Load (ETLQ) - the Q stands for enhanced data quality.
The former is a dedicated platform designed to disseminate information efficiently for business intelligence and analytic intelligence applications-from SAS or third-parties.
SAS ETLQ is a data integration platform that synthesises corporate data from disparate information silos in a timely, cost-effective manner. It is the only ETL solution with integrated data cleansing routines that are both customisable and usable out of the box.
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