Enterprise Business Intelligence: Opening the Flood Gate
Healthcare providers are keenly interested in overall performance improvement, but find the current reporting solutions limited in scope and depth. They are further challenged by increased regulatory requirements, the heightened need for industry benchmarking, and pay-for-performance initiatives. Many organizations have concluded that a new level of data aggregation, analysis, and reporting across the enterprise is needed to fulfill existing and future requirements, causing them to investigate enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions.
For the purposes of this study, provider partners of KLAS defined enterprise business intelligence as a single-vendor tool or process that included analytics, reporting, and data management for all the traditional business offices as well as some clinical departments.
Vendors see an opportunity in the BI market and are approaching from various angles. Vendors--such as McKesson and Avega--are expanding their capabilities from the financial strength of their product offerings into clinical reporting. Other vendors--such as Cerner and Epic--are approaching the BI market from the strength of their clinical data which facilitates a push to combine clinical and financial data for comprehensive reporting. A third group of vendors--such as Business Objects (SAP), Cognos (IBM), Microsoft, and Oracle--originated outside of healthcare and are now aggressively entering the market with considerable IT infrastructure and reporting experience from other industries.
The most often considered vendors (in alphabetical order) included in the 2008 Enterprise Business Intelligence perception report are Avega (MedAssets), Business Objects (SAP), Cerner, Cognos (IBM), Eclipsys, Lawson, McKesson, Microsoft, Oracle, and Siemens. Other vendors included in the report are Dimensional Insight, GE (IDX), GoldenGate, i2b2, IBM, Information Builders, MedeFinance, Pentaho, PowerHealth, QlikTech, SAP, and SIS.
Vendors Most Often Considered
Few responding organizations currently do any enterprise BI. However, of the more than 140 providers interviewed, 32 report having a partial BI solution in place or being in the early phases of implementing a solution, while 97 others plan to deploy a solution in the next few years. This suggests that there is a great BI opportunity with a growing appetite for enterprise analytics solutions.
Strategy for Enterprise Business Intelligence - Overall
The enterprise BI market is extremely immature in healthcare. All organizations see a need to bring integrated analytics solutions to both the clinical and financial departments, but providers feel that no vendor is able to bring the type of mature solution to all departments across the entire enterprise - yet. Despite the challenges, providers are pressing forward, anxiously preparing for the day when the reporting and analytics needs of the organization make it imperative to implement some sort of enterprise BI solution.
Vendor Performance Research Tools:
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Perception studies conducted by KLAS, such as this Enterprise Business Intelligence study, are snapshots of provider's opinions on a given market segment. The scores given by respondents in perception studies are not meant to measure actual vendor performance and do not impact or displace performance rankings or scores reflected in KLAS performance studies or online databases.
A complimentary executive summary of the 2008 Business Intelligence report is available for the following:
- All healthcare providers with a current Platinum KLAS subscription (summary available via download on the PK reports tab -- Log in).
- Each healthcare provider who participated in the study's research (summary delivered via email).