Difficult to choose BI tools? Refer to how to select BI models in this tertiary hospital!

In today's medical industry, with the rapid development of information technology and the explosive growth of data volume, tertiary hospitals, as high-end providers of medical services, are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. How to extract valuable information from massive medical data, optimize hospital operations, and improve the quality of diagnosis and treatment has become an urgent problem for hospital management. The introduction of BI tools can provide hospitals with a powerful data analysis platform, making data-driven decision-making possible.

With the development of business and the popularization of smart phones, the clinical and management departments of a tertiary hospital have more and more obvious needs for multi-dimensional display of reports, data drilling and mobile terminal support, and the hospital's computer center has been lacking effective means to meet these needs. This article will discuss how to evaluate and select the most appropriate BI solution according to the specific needs of hospitals, as well as the far-reaching impact of this process on hospital management and service quality. Through an in-depth analysis of the hospital's BI tool selection process, we will explain in detail how to choose the right BI tool for your own situation.

1. What convenience can BI tools bring to hospitals?

BI tools have significant importance in the medical industry, especially in tertiary hospitals. As a large-scale medical institution that provides high-level medical services, tertiary hospitals are faced with the challenge of processing and analyzing massive data. Here are a few key applications of BI tools in healthcare organizations:

• Improve decision-making efficiency: BI tools can help hospital management quickly identify problems and opportunities through real-time data analysis, so as to make more accurate and timely management decisions.

• Optimize resource allocation: By analyzing patient data, operational data, and more, BI tools can help hospitals optimize resource allocation, such as bed allocation, personnel scheduling, and equipment usage, to improve operational efficiency.

• Improve patient care: BI tools can analyze clinical data and identify trends and patterns in patient care to provide more targeted and personalized care and improve the quality of care.

• Reduce costs: BI tools can monitor and analyze healthcare costs, identify opportunities for cost savings, reduce unnecessary expenses and improve financial performance through granular management.

• Supporting research and development: BI tools can analyze data from the development of new therapies and drugs, support hospital decision-making in the field of scientific research, and promote medical innovation.

• Public health surveillance: BI tools can analyze public health trends, such as the spread of infectious diseases, and help hospitals respond to public health events in a timely manner and improve their response capacity.

• Meet regulatory requirements: As the healthcare industry becomes more regulated, BI tools can help hospitals meet data reporting and compliance requirements from government and regulatory agencies, ensuring data accuracy and transparency.

• Promote digital transformation: BI tools are a key component of the digital transformation of hospitals, helping to build smart hospitals and realize the digitalization, networking, and intelligence of medical services.

In summary, the application of BI tools in tertiary hospitals plays a vital role in improving the quality of medical services, optimizing operation management, supporting scientific research and innovation, and meeting regulatory requirements. Through the effective use of BI tools, tertiary hospitals can better cope with the increasingly complex medical environment and achieve sustainable development.

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2. BI tool selection ideas

1. Clarify requirements

BI projects are driven by the needs of the enterprise, and the subsequent project plan can only generate value if it is in line with the actual business needs of the enterprise. Therefore, in the early stage of the project, it is necessary to clarify the general requirements, which can support the establishment of the BI project and the selection of tools.

2. Choose BI tools according to your own situation

If you want to do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools. BI tools are at the heart of a BI project, and choosing the right tools is half the battle. However, there are great differences in the industry, specific business, development management level, informatization level, and technical strength of personnel in different enterprises, and copying other people's answers cannot solve the fundamental problem.

Therefore, it is necessary to be cautious in the selection of BI tools, not to be conservative, not to be aggressive, and not to blindly pursue new technologies. Pay attention not only to the tool itself, but also to consider the strength of the enterprise itself, and choose the right BI tool from the business scenario, which will definitely bring good returns.

3. Conduct demand research

1. How to conduct demand research

There are two main steps to conducting a needs research:

(1) Determine the general needs of the project and the detailed requirements of the landing

It is necessary to have a general understanding of which departments need to use the BI system, in which scenarios, and how much value it can bring after use, and it is best to quantify the profit improvement (i.e., there is visible and quantifiable value) brought to the enterprise as a whole.

(2) Do a detailed demand research on the business side

The general requirements should be in-depth and refined, and the granularity should be specific to the executable granularity, such as the dimensions and units of the analysis and display of each business indicator. This process involves business, technology, data, etc., and needs to be completed through detailed requirements research. Gathering and clarifying requirements is not an easy task, especially when digging into the detailed, deep-seated requirements of the demand side.

• Investigate business unit analysis scenarios: Before investigating business department analysis scenarios, the first thing to do is to determine the business department that needs to be investigated based on the users of the BI system. Specific business scenario requirements can be collected from the following three levels.

A. Investigate the management level, mainly investigate the indicators related to the enterprise strategy to analyze the needs, the method is to disassemble the strategic objectives of the enterprise and the department layer by layer, and then analyze from the perspective of data to support the strategic objectives to obtain demand data.

B. Investigate the needs of the business department in some daily analysis scenarios. It can be developed from the corresponding business, statistical indicators, analysis dimensions, analysis granularity, and current analysis methods.

C. Investigate some hidden needs of the business department, which are different from daily analysis scenarios and need to be explored through brainstorming or interviews.

• Ensure the quality of research data

The data in an enterprise is mainly divided into business system data, manually collected data, and external data according to the source. Therefore, the investigation of data quality will also be carried out from these three sources.

1. Business system data research: The BI project team needs to clarify the contact person of each business system, obtain relevant data interfaces and data dictionaries, and negotiate and formulate response strategies if they cannot obtain them.
2. Manual data research: The project team can collect historical manual data in advance, which can be carried out in parallel with the needs research of the business department.
3. External data research: You can refer to the research method of business system data, focusing on the availability and usage scenarios of data.
4. Design, validate and modify data systems

When designing the data system, we mainly consider the two levels of the original table and the basic wide table, combined with the minimum granularity of the data usage requirements considered in the previous survey, as well as the dimensions and indicators that may be used in the analysis, so as to achieve full coverage of the analysis scenario as much as possible and meet the requirements of various data granularity. The confirmation and modification of the data system mainly includes the addition/deletion/modification of data dimensions, indicators, and granularity, and the unification of field meanings and logical calibers.

This demand research method is comprehensive and efficient, which can complete the summary of requirements in a short time, and many enterprises use this method to conduct comprehensive and detailed demand research before the project is established.

2. The results of the hospital's demand survey

After two weeks of research using the needs research method, the hospital found four major problems in particular:

• The business operation data is not clear, and there is a lack of visual charts and charts

In the current healthcare environment, the day-to-day operations of tertiary hospitals generate a large amount of business data, which is critical for hospital management and decision-making. However, the traditional way of presenting data, the detailed table, although it records the specific situation of each business in detail, does not provide a macro perspective, making it difficult for management to quickly grasp the overall operating situation. The lack of intuitive visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, or pie charts, makes data analysis complex and time-consuming, and critical business insights are often hidden in complex data that is not easy to discover.

• Business reports cannot be displayed on mobile devices

With the popularity of mobile work, there is a growing need for hospital in-house personnel to be able to view and analyze reports on mobile devices. They want to be able to access key business metrics and real-time data from their phone or tablet anytime, anywhere, so they can respond in a timely manner. However, existing business reporting systems are not optimized for mobile and cannot be effectively displayed on mobile devices, which limits the efficiency and responsiveness of medical staff.

• There are disconnects in the data

There is a disconnect between the hospital's data systems, and data from different sources and types cannot be effectively integrated and correlated. This phenomenon of data silos makes it impossible to drill into and analyze data at a deep level, making it difficult to fully understand business processes and patient conditions from macro to micro, which affects the optimization of resource allocation and service quality in hospitals.

• Lack of dynamic visualization screens

Lack of dynamic visual dashboards to display key information and real-time notifications. Existing notification methods rely on traditional broadcast and telephone communication, which is inefficient and prone to delays and misunderstandings of information. An efficient information exchange system is essential to improve the efficiency of communication within the hospital and the ability to respond to emergencies.

To sum up, the tertiary hospital has obvious deficiencies in business data display, mobile access, data integration and information interaction. In order to solve these problems, the hospital urgently needs a BI tool that can provide rich visualization charts, support mobile access, realize data correlation analysis, and have a dynamic visual large screen function to improve overall operational efficiency and management level.

At the same time, the hospital management also planned the long-term goal of building a digital hospital and a smart hospital, and needed to use the resources of the data center to analyze the development of scientific research, operation and maintenance, but lacked professional data analysis and display tools.

4. Choose the right BI tool according to your needs

1. How to choose a BI tool

For enterprises, choosing a BI tool should comprehensively consider various selection indicators, not the higher the price, the better. Judging from the survey data of CIOs by the Finesoft Data Application Research Institute, CIOs are most concerned about whether the BI tool is efficient, easy to use and convenient, as shown in the figure below on the key factors of BI selection. In addition, nearly one-third of enterprises value the service support and learning resources provided by BI vendors, indicating that enterprises realize that the services and learning resources that come with BI tools play a vital role in the operation and maintenance development of projects.

Therefore, based on the survey results and other selection references, the selection indicators are divided into three aspects: tools, manufacturers and markets.

(1) Tools

• Ease of use: Ease of use determines the overall user experience of the BI platform and is the primary factor affecting the continued use of the BI platform. Specifically, the ease of use of BI tools is mainly reflected in the difficulty of getting started, interactive experience, and the richness of learning resources.
• Performance: Good BI tools have a matching data engine to improve the performance of data response, and flexibly adjust the calculation mode and scheme according to different data levels and types. In terms of functionality, BI tools also need to ensure their stability, and frequent downtime and failures are too much for businesses to bear.
• Functions: BI tools have many functions and different needs of different enterprises, but there are several core functions that must be possessed, mainly including data preparation, data processing, data analysis and visualization, platform management and control, and scenario demand conversion.
• Procurement costs: The costs of purchasing and applying BI tools (products) usually include: license purchase costs, implementation costs, vendor service fees, and product learning and usage costs. On the premise of meeting the demand, enterprises should not be limited to the absolute low license cost when selecting models, but should consider comprehensively and pursue relative total cost leadership.

(2) Manufacturers

The capabilities of BI vendors are also an important aspect to consider when selecting a model, and at the vendor level, three main elements are considered: brand, service, and solution.

• Branding: In the B2B space, a brand is the image of a manufacturer. For the evaluation of BI vendor brands, you can first look at the vendor's operating model, such as one-stop service or combined service, and then look at the vendor's experience and accumulated reputation, such as whether there are many successful benchmark customer cases, and whether it does bring real value to enterprise customers.
• Service: When selecting a model, it is necessary to fully consider whether the manufacturer provides localized services, whether it can respond quickly, whether it has a perfect problem-solving mechanism, etc., and also consider whether it is specific to the enterprise

Some requirements, such as whether the vendor can provide services to support the secondary development of BI products.

• Solution: The solution is also an important manifestation of the BI vendor's capabilities, and whether the vendor has a specific industry-specific solution reflects whether the vendor has accumulated sufficient experience in BI applications in the industry and whether it has a thorough understanding of the characteristics of the industry.

(3) Market

The macroeconomic environment also has a greater impact on the BI market, which is also a factor that needs to be taken into account when selecting BI tools. At present, the two main industry leaders in the foreign market are Microsoft's PowerBI and Tableau. According to IDC's "China Business Intelligence Software Market Tracker Report for the Second Half of 2021", the top 10 vendors in China's business intelligence market accounted for 66.2% in 2021, of which Finesoft ranked first with 17.5%.

Domestic BI vendors have advantages in localization services and landing capabilities: they have a better understanding of the pain points of domestic enterprises, they provide more intimate localization services such as project implementation, technical support, learning and training, and data talent services, which make the operation and maintenance and talent cultivation after project implementation more convenient, and different domestic software companies in the upstream and downstream of BI also provide interfaces for integration. It is foreseeable that under the nurturing of a large number of favorable policies and innovative soil, more domestic BI products will appear in the domestic market to compete with foreign products, while domestic BI products will receive more attention.

Using the above selection factors as indicators, you can make a BI tool selection score table, as shown in the following figure. For each metric item, consider the strengths, weaknesses, and further understanding of the BI tool, and calculate the total score according to the weights after scoring according to the evaluation dimensions.

2. The indicators considered by the hospital in selecting BI tools

The hospital comprehensively considered the needs of combing, combined with the above-mentioned BI tool selection methods, and finally extracted four evaluation indicators for BI tool selection, including ease of use, presentation ability, mobile support, and price.

(1) Ease of use

Ease of use is one of the primary considerations when choosing the right BI tool for a tertiary hospital. The business environment in hospitals is constantly changing, and the needs of patients and medical staff are constantly evolving. In this context, only those BI tools that are intuitively designed and easy to use can make data analysis and report development efficient for non-technical people to get up to speed quickly. Such a tool can quickly adapt to new business needs and provide hospitals with timely data support to better serve patients and improve the quality of care.

(2) Strong ability to show

Demonstrating a strong presence is also crucial for hospital management. Hospital executives have made it clear that the existing rudimentary form of forms does not meet their needs for data presentation. What they are looking forward to is a new system that can not only provide rich chart types, such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, etc., but also enable dynamic data interaction, such as data drilling, filtering, and linkage. Such a system will be able to better support the hospital's decision-making, meet the business needs now and in the next five years, while improving the professionalism and attractiveness of data reporting.

(3) 100% mobile support

The support for mobile terminals is also a point that hospitals cannot ignore when choosing BI tools. With the ubiquity of mobile work, hospital staff want to be able to access and analyze data anytime, anywhere via mobile devices. Therefore, BI tools must provide 100% mobile support, including native apps, app integrations, and WeChat official account integrations. Especially considering that hospitals are already working through WeCom, the new data analytics platform must be able to seamlessly integrate into WeChat to quickly push information and achieve efficient mobile office. In addition, the hospital's own app also needs to be integrated into the BI tool to ensure data consistency and convenience.

(4) The price is reasonable

Finally, the price factor is also something that hospitals must consider when choosing a BI tool. The price of the BI tool must be within the hospital's annual budget, while ensuring that the money invested brings the maximum potential benefit. This means that BI tools must not only meet the needs of hospitals functionally, but also be cost-effective. Hospitals need to assess the total cost of ownership of BI tools (including software license fees, implementation fees, training costs, etc.) and predict the potential economic benefits such as cost savings, efficiency gains, and increased revenue from the use of BI tools.

In summary, the hospital selected BI tools based on factors such as ease of use, presence, mobile support, and price to ensure that the chosen tool would meet current and future needs while being economically viable.

5. Summary

When choosing a BI tool, it's important to know what you need. Hospital management needs to deeply analyze the current data management and decision support processes to identify specific issues and challenges in the business. This may include combing through data needs for patient care, financial analysis, operational efficiency, clinical research, and more. In addition, it is important to consider the next three to five years to ensure that the BI tool you choose can adapt to the expansion and change of the hospital's business.

Although the main reference indicators for different enterprises to evaluate BI tools are not exactly the same, these indicators are determined by the needs derived from the current situation of the enterprise.

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