Success Story

Improving the quality of medical treatment by leveraging contemporary technology

Intermountain Health Care incorporates Visual Mining software to help increase productivity, free up internal resources, and better meet organizational analytical goals without requiring IT staff support.

IHC has a mature and established data warehouse. They needed a tool to help them more efficiently and effectively develop interactive analytical applications that leverage the information available in our enterprise data warehouse. The Data Warehouse staff were receiving many requests from various business units to build performance management tools such as scorecards and dashboards to help them better manage their area of the business. They needed a development tool to accelerate the development of these types of applications.

Figure 1: The Enterprise Data Warehouse tracks the number and duration of current jobs running on the data warehouse.

IHC’s Data Warehouse management identified over 20 commercial products when they commenced their evaluation and selection project. After a thorough evaluation and benchmark with a short list of three, they ultimately selected NetCharts Reporting Suite for the following reasons:

• Price - NetCharts was a good value;
• Openness - Java-based development environment;
• Customer satisfaction - we contacted three existing
  customers of NetCharts and received very complimentary references based on tool functionality and vendor
  responsiveness to customer enhancement and support requests;
• Flexibility - some of the other tools we evaluated required the implementation of a “heavy” quality improvement methodology, such as Six Sigma or Balanced Scorecard. We wanted a tool flexible enough to adapt to our own quality improvement methodology and reporting methods - and NetCharts provided the most options without investing in more infrastructure.

“We needed a tool to help us quickly develop performance management applications, such as dashboards and scorecards. Additionally, the tool had to have the potential to be put in the hands of a “power user,” who could build this type of application without requiring IT staff support,” said Mr. Steven Barlow, Manager, Enterprise Data Warehouse at Intermountain Health Care. “So far NetCharts has accomplished this. We have several interactive reporting applications that have been developed by non-IT staff and are now deployed across the enterprise via our reports portal.”
Hundreds of views/consumers (i.e., those users who are viewing the reporting applications developed by the designers above) access these reporting applications via IHC’s internal reports portal. These interactive reports will increase the visibility and availability measures deemed important by the leaders of various business units and provide information to support tactical and strategic decision making.

Figure 2: The Enterprise Data Warehouse tracks system performance and utilization to assure acceptable service levels.

Looking to the Future

All 30 designer licenses that were included in the initial purchase of the application have been allocated and the Enterprise Data Warehouse staff have received requests for additional licenses. They will also continue their evaluation of the NetCharts Analytics module and potentially add it to their tool set.

About Intermountain Health Care
IHC is a nonprofit health care organization based in Salt Lake City that has served the needs of Utah and Idaho residents for the past 30 years. The IHC system includes hospitals, clinics, health insurance plans, a physician group and affiliated physicians. Last year, in more than 147,000 cases, IHC hospitals and associated clinics provided $67 million in charitable assistance. A central part of IHC’s mission is to provide quality medical care to persons from the Intermountain region with a medical need, regardless of ability to pay. IHC was recently named the nation’s number one integrated health network by Verispan, a research firm headquartered in Yardley, Pennsylvania. IHC has been ranked number one in each of the last four years, as well as in 2000.