Real-time analytics for healthcare staffing
Before this engagement, the data and reports our client needed could take months to access, were out-of-date by the time they received them and were often inaccurate. Ollion came in to change that.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
A healthcare staffing company wanted to visualize and measure key business metrics to enable better decision-making.
THE SOLUTION
Ollion built a modern data platform that centralized data from throughout the organization and presented user-friendly dashboards for near real-time analytics for healthcare.
THE OUTCOME
Our client has a real-time analytics solution that meets their needs now and will scale as they grow.
The challenge
In the healthcare industry, the ability to assess the current and future staffing needs for healthcare workers is critical to providing top-quality patient care. Executives need to feel confident that the data they’re using to make decisions is trustworthy, up-to-date and available when they need it.
Our healthcare staffing client wanted to improve their ability to make data-driven decisions but first needed support moving from their current state of inaccessible data, time-consuming reporting and poor data governance. They turned to the healthcare data and analytics strategy team at Ollion to help them build a modern data and real-time analytics solution that would scale as they grow.
The solution
The Ollion healthcare data and analytics strategy team worked closely with our client’s executives and stakeholders to understand their challenges, their business goals and the metrics they needed to see. With this information in mind, the team designed and implemented an end-to-end data strategy that:
- Established the most important and relevant data for their needs
- Defined and documented terms, metrics and KPIs to ensure consistency throughout the organization
- Enabled quick and easy access to the data they need at the time they need it
- Was scalable for additional data sources, advanced analytics and future growth
Scalable data centralization
To make this solution a reality, we loaded all raw versions of source data into a Snowflake cloud data warehouse. This centralized the data into one location and enabled the use of modern cloud-based reporting tools. The ingestion solution is scalable and modular, so it significantly reduces load time and effort required to add a new data source.
A holistic view of the business
Within the Snowflake Data Cloud, the Ollion team created a business layer to model data and match business domains. For each business domain, we combined the client's three main sources of data to provide a holistic view of their business, applying business rules where necessary.
A single source of truth
We created a reporting layer off of the business layer to be used in Power BI reports. The reporting layer centralized KPI calculations to maintain one version of the truth for different reports. It also summarized data for easy and fast reporting.
User-friendly operational dashboards
Finally, we developed two new operational dashboards for the client, leveraging the new business and report layers. They visualized key metrics at a summary level but also enabled users to drill down in ways they were previously unavailable. These operational dashboards are available on their report server, so users can access them any time they want.
Additionally, we implemented row-level security on the client’s most widely used dashboard, so offices were only able to see their data.
The outcome
Prior to engaging with Ollion, accessing the metrics executives needed required submitting a request to the IT team to gather the information from their source systems, then waiting for them to produce the report. The process was slow and the data was often unreliable.
As a result of our modern data and real-time analytics solution, this healthcare staffing organization's executive team and other business users can run their own reports and visualize key operational metrics that they can trust. They are able to access information in dashboards quickly without having to go back to the IT team for every request. This enables them to make fast and informed decisions based on accurate, up-to date information.
Additionally, now that their data is clean, accessible and reliable. the client has been able to grow their business intelligence team and hire more analysts.
