Healthcare Case Study – Using BI and IT to Improve Efficiency
This report is the continuation of Part A. The seven case studies were discussed in Part A. This report focuses on two case studies from Part A. The two case studies are:
- Creating a BI strategy for an Emergency Healthcare Company
- A Major Domestic Foodservice Distributor
This report would discuss these two case studies from the perspective of Business Intelligence. The report would also discuss the changing trends like cloud computing, RFID, etc. for these organizations. The paper would also discuss the benefits of BI and Information Technology for the respective organizations. The fits case study of health care can be discussed in detail as:
The case study presents that that health care quality improvement is the focus of the policy makers in the country. The emergency health care department wants an efficient system in place where the health care services could be provided to patients without any delay. For emergency system of health care, it is important that there should not be any delay in the processes (Chang, 2014). The various aspects of BI and value addition for this healthcare company can be discussed as:
The organization was able to use the Business Intelligence and Information Technology in an effective manner. From the case study, it can be inferred that the implementation of BI was beneficial for the organization. The case study presents the four key value ads of the BI implementation. These four value additions can be discussed as:
Increase in the operational efficiency: The improvement in the operational efficiency was one of the key benefits of implementation of BI for this healthcare organization. The emergency healthcare company went from a lot of manual, repetitive work to an automated solution.
Better end-user adoption: The new BI systems removed layers of complexity and increased speed when it comes to decision making as the end users can now run reports with one click. Therefore, it can be said that there was better end-user adoption with the implementation of BI.
Knowledge transfer: With the implementation of Business Intelligence software, the health care organization was able to manage the knowledge in an effective manner.
Improved executive engagement: In developing executive dashboards for several of its joint venture partners, the emergency healthcare company is providing innovation in reporting of its key hospital and emergency department indicators. The improvement in the executive engagement has further helped the organization to overcome the operational problems.
With the use of Information Technology and Business Intelligence there were certain changes in the existing business process of organization. For example, the customers’ data was recorded electronically. With the use of smart phones, the data was made accessible at a single click. These benefits helped the hospital to bring improvement in efficiency. However, there was a challenge involved with respect to change management. It is suggested that the management should focus on training and development of employees so that the impact of changing trends is positive.
Food Delivery Company Case Study – Achieving Compliance and Effective Inventory Management
The key value add for organization is in terms of efficiency. From the future perspective, it is important that different stakeholders should join hands to understand the problems that could occur with BI (Fan & Lau, 2015). It would be correct to say that health care technology would play a critical role to help health care organizations to achieve their goals and objectives. The healthy people 2020 goals could be achieved with a strong focus on health care technology and health care information management system.
The diagrammatic representation of the use of BI for organization can be shown as:
The timelines for the implementation of BI can be shown as:
The Budget for various activities can be shown as:
The main problem in this case study is the compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act motivated this company to tighten controls on sensitive company data. Consequently, their distribution centers throughout North America needed training in the use of new reporting tools. Staff would have to be prepared both in their usage and in what data could be accessed. At the same time the foodservice distributor wanted to ensure that inventory management is effective.
With the use of BI, the company developed and established a system where the access to data was limited. The IT was used to implement the layer of BI where data was masked. The employees ate different levels had access to data and the people with respective level of clearance can access the data. This strategy ensured that the company works in compliance with various legal guidelines. It can be said that BI was used in a useful way in this case study and this ensured that stakeholders of internal and external stakeholders were met (Stone & Woodcock, 2014). The outcome of the BI implementation helped the organization to achieve two missions. These can be highlighted as:
- To reassure the staff of their access to the data they needed
- To build their trust in the reliability of that data
There was a transformation in the existing business process of the organizations. One of the new things for organization was the use of big data. The organization managed this challenge with adequate training of employee. The company ensured that employees across the distributors are trained for three days. Another new trend observed in the organization was the use of new reporting and dashboard mechanism. The reporting mechanism ensured that people can make inferences from the data without wasting their time. Another changing trend that could be observed in the business operations of this organization is the use of cloud computing. With the use of cloud computing the organization would further reduce the dependency on large systems and transactions. It would be correct to say that the combination of cloud computing and big data would be a powerful tool for organization to mover forward and handle the complex transactions.
Common Problems Faced by Organizations
The major benefits of BI system for this organization is that it BI can help the organizations to analyze the data. With the use of Business Intelligence, organizations would be able to use the data that is collected from consumers. In the operational sense, the benefits with the use of BI include improve in the data quality. In the management sense, the benefit of BI includes better decision-making, effective reporting, improved employee satisfaction and better customer satisfaction (Turban & Sharda, 2011).
The graph for the phased implementation of BI in the organization can be shown as:
The budget for the above implementation timeline can be shown as:
Time |
Budget ($) |
6 M |
5000 |
12 M |
5000 |
15 M |
8000 |
18 M |
10000 |
Total |
28000 |
The Return on Investment Graph for this investment can be shown as:
ROI |
|||||
1st year |
2nd Year |
3 Year |
4th Year |
||
Total Investment |
28000 |
10% |
20% |
30% |
40% |
Value |
2800 |
0.02 |
0.06 |
0.12 |
Conclusion
The above paper discussed the two case studies of health care organization and food delivery company. In both the cases the BI problem was unique; however, there are some elements that are common across both the case studies. One of the common problems that are observed across all these companies is the problem of efficiency. It appears that the management is under pressure to cut the cost due to increased competition and therefore, organizations look for the IT solutions to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the system (Wixom & Ariyachandra, 2014). The objective of the organizations is to eliminate the redundancies in the system. Basically, organization wants that the wastage should be minimal in the system so that organizations can work with high efficiency. Another common problem that is observed in most of the case studies is that organizations have lot of data and information. However, organizations and leaders struggle to make useful inferences from this data. In this era of technology, organizations would gather a lot of data from customers. This data would include name, phone number, email id, demographic information etc. Richards & Yeoh (2017) argued that marketers could use this data to make useful inferences. It would also help the organizations to do contextual marketing and in long term it would enable the organizations to save the cost.
It would be correct to say that both the organization are able to make the use of Business Intelligence in a smart and successful manner. It is recommended that these organizations must have a specific plan in place to get continuous benefits from BI. In the long term, with the effective use of BI, these organizations can also gain competitive advantage over its competitors. It is also recommended that the strategies and policies around BI should be tied together with the ERP strategy of the organizations.
References
Chang, V. (2014). The business intelligence as a service in the cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, 37, 512-534.
Fan, S., Lau, R. Y., & Zhao, J. L. (2015). Demystifying big data analytics for business intelligence through the lens of marketing mix. Big Data Research, 2(1), 28-32.
Isik, Ö., Jones, M. C., & Sidorova, A. (2013). Business intelligence success: The roles of BI capabilities and decision environments. Information & Management, 50(1), 13-23.
Richards, G., Yeoh, W., Chong, A. Y. L., & Popovi?, A. (2017). Business Intelligence Effectiveness and Corporate Performance Management: An Empirical Analysis. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 1-9.
Stone, M. D., & Woodcock, N. D. (2014). Interactive, direct and digital marketing: A future that depends on better use of business intelligence. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 8(1), 4-17.
Turban, E., Sharda, R., & Delen, D. (2011). Decision support and business intelligence systems. Pearson Education India.
Wixom, B., Ariyachandra, T., Douglas, D. E., Goul, M., Gupta, B., Iyer, L. S., … & Turetken, O. (2014). The current state of business intelligence in academia: The arrival of big data. CAIS, 34, 1.
WCI Data Solutions. (2017). Amalgamating Disparate Systems and Creating a Long Term BI Strategy for an Emergency Healthcare Company. Retrieved from: https://wciconsulting.com/business-intelligence-consultancy/business-intelligence-case-studies/creating-a-bi-strategy-for-an-emergency-healthcare-company/
WCI Data Solutions. (2017). A Major Domestic Foodservice Distributor. Retrieved from: https://wciconsulting.com/business-intelligence-consultancy/business-intelligence-case-studies/a-major-domestic-foodservice-distributor/