At Healthcare Informatics, we have been writing with increasing frequency about the application of business intelligence (BI) tools to clinical data.

As KLAS Research director Lorin Bird told us in January, BI gives providers the ability to use data to better understand patterns related to quality and patient safety and improve outcomes. It can also help them marry financial and clinical outcomes data. With BI tools, they can prove that better clinical outcomes lead to a reduction in cost, and that more attention to chronic care can leads to savings, Bird said.

I just finished a feature story for KM World magazine that highlighted a few other examples of hospital executives leading clinical data warehouse/BI initiatives that Healthcare Informatics’ readers might find interesting.

For instance, when Hennepin County Medical Center, a 469-bed hospital in Minneapolis, re-launched its clinical analytics effort in January 2010, it turned to a performance analysis tool called Insight Enterprise from Mediware, which merges data from a half-dozen clinical applications, including Epic Systems’ electronic health record. Sam VanNorman, Hennepin’s manager of performance reporting and analysis, told me that one valuable lesson learned from the effort is that it should be interdisciplinary rather than seen as an IT project. Hennepin has a knowledge management team, and VanNorman works closely with its leader as well as with information security, finance, a clinical group and supply chain experts. “It is important for them to be involved in developing the first 100 indicators on the dashboards,” he said, “since they will be responsible for answering when things appear to go awry.”

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