Category
Technology
Submitted By
Anthony Pfaff, anthony.pfaff@cuanschutz.edu, Business Services Program Director, Psychiatry
Project Team
Anthony Pfaff, anthony.pfaff@cuanschutz.edu, Business Services Program Director
Jake Pratt, Jacob.Pratt@cuanschutz.edu, Business Intelligence Developer & Program Manager
Project Description
The Department of Psychiatry has built up a nascent business intelligence team with the plan that it would tackle problems which provide value and efficiencies to the department. Quickly after we started the team, the team has produced results. Previously, we were maintaining extensive spreadsheets aggregated together by running multiple manual reports out of the Epic electronic health record system. These reports were run to determine whether required flowsheets were completed by clinicians after each patient visit. Running reports and aggregating them in spreadsheets was a time consuming manual process that had a high labor cost. We were able to automate this by leveraging our business intelligence team's access to the backend databases for the medical record, Clarity and Caboodle. Using SQL and writing complex queries, the business intelligence team was able to pull all data together in a repeatable process every month with little manual effort.
Project Efficiency
The greatest innovation was the establishment of a lean business intelligence team with access to all the relevant campus business intelligence databases, such as CIW, Clarity, and Caboodle, with the plan that there would be opportunities for the team to drive efficiencies by querying data in bulk using query technologies instead of manual reports. This proved to be an immediate value add by dramatically reducing manual effort for this specific project and has proven the concept as it is expanded to other areas within the department.
Project Inspiration
We wanted to build the business intelligence team after realizing we needed more access to clinical data. The department previously invested in a business intelligence program that was focused on business data (e.g., finance, HR) and not on clinical data, and that previous investment didn't directly access bulk reporting databases on campus but instead required running manual reports. Realizing there is already a rich ecosystem of data on campus that can be used for reduction of manual effort (e.g., CIW, Clarity, Caboodle), we took the leap to see if we could build a program leveraging those technologies.
What Makes You Happiest about this Project?
I am happiest that this has proven the concept works: it is worth investing in technology experts who know how to use bulk reporting databases like the Central Information Warehouse (CIW), Epic Clarity, and Epic Caboodle. Everyone needs data to do their jobs, but some questions are difficult to answer, and when it's harder to access the right data, I was happy to see that bringing experts in makes it faster and easier to do so.
