What bare minimum features should a Hospital BI tool provide?
Most hospitals have business intelligence (BI) systems which claim to provide a solution. However I think most BI tools provide post facto analysis and miss out on the real-time aspect. An effective BI solution is the one which accounts for analytics considering “People, Process & Systems” in a hospital.
People:
Most people want to be challenged and to prove what they can do. The human tendency is to get into a comfort zone and main the status quo. Hospital BI tool should have effective way to set objectives at each level and track the performance against the objectives commonly referred as KPIs. A BI tool should address following needs:
Process:
• The BI tool should be able to track the workflows across hospital departments to ensure adherence to standard operating procedures (Evidence based medication).
• The tool should be able to define flexible workflows with set tolerance levels around adherence to key activities and raise alerts, escalations on breach of tolerance levels.
Systems:
• The systems providing data for BI should ensure effective usage of technology and reduction in human interventions in capture of data. The BI tool should capture/fetch data from the parent system at real time without affecting the performance of the parent system. The tool needs to allow interoperability to enable corrective action by logging into the source system of KPI data.
• The BI tool should have interface inventory around the common interfacing standards to integrate with the HIS systems. It should support seamless integration capabilities for custom interfacing needs.
