Business Intelligence Within the NHS
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is a business management term which refers to applications and technologies which are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about their organisational operations.
Within NHS Trusts across the country there is a need for greater automation of the report generation process. This need for automation is creating extra work for Information Analysts leaving the Information Analyst spending too much time creating ad-hoc reports. It is InformationFind.Net Ltd's core skill as a Business Intelligence Consultancy to automate the process of generating reports and also add quality to the process of generating reports by making the processes repeatable.
InformationFind.Net Ltd delivers this automation and quality improvement by; -
Joining the Trust as an Analysts for a pre-defined short period of time. This enables me to take some of the pressure off this team by sharing some of the work load and develop relationships with the Analysts and customers.
After delivering reports as an Analyst I then use my Business Intelligence skills to define a more automated process of; -
1) Extracting information from source, e.g. "SUS"/ Secondary User Service into a central standardised repository.
2) Analysing information from different perspectives, e.g, Time, Patient and Cost (Spells),
3) Display information from this repository to meet specific business rules in management friendly reports e.g.
3.1) 18 Weeks Dash Board Reporting
3.2) Service Line Reporting.
3.3) Payments By Results (PbR) analysis
The technical skill I use to deliver these Business Benefits is SQL Server 2005 which consists of the following components; -
1) SQL Server Integrated Services (SSIS) to automate the Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) of data sources into a central standardised repository.
2) SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to automated the collation of this centralised repository into difference business perspectives.
3) SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to automated the presentation of these different business perspectives into management friendly reporting, e.g. Dashboard, Score Cards, drill down, etc.
Click here for SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence video.
Click here for audio of United States experience of Business Intelligence within Health Informatics.