Back from Microsoft's Health User Group

This two day exploration of the use of MS technology meets annually on the MS campus in Redmond, WA. It's attended by a cross section of health IT people. There's a similar meeting in the Spring for one day.

What’s new? I’ve been attending since 2006 with a particular interest in Business Intelligence, but can say that it had not been a significant HUG interest until now. The sessions on BI, analytics, or Clinical Informatics were packed. One session, mentioned below, was SRO until more chairs could be obtained.

One slide for a keynote (which isn’t available) cited a Gartner statistic that BI would be the top interest in Health IT in both 2009 and 2012.

A theme that repeatedly surfaced was the paramount role of business and clinical lines rather than IT. One session in particular was packed, Leveraging SharePoint’s Business Intelligence Capabilities to Drive Process Improvements in Healthcare.

Don’t dwell to much on the Sharepoint theme. The other theme was how to structure a successful BI operation in a health care organization. Basically, the hospital for which the presenter worked embarked for years on a BI effort led by IT, which failed. Success only occured when a BI Governance system was put in place to transform the process - one which placed control by the business stakeholders.

The other key presentation to note was Next Generation Decision Support for Hospitals: Using Microsoft Technologies You Already Own to Drive New Levels of Performance, delivered by Bob Lokken, CEO, WhiteCloud Analytics. Bob founded and developed Proclarity, a company which consulted this last decade on building solutions with MS Analysis services (“cubes” and data mining). Furthermore, his company developed software which became perhaps the pre-eminent software to “surf” on the cubes.

He sold the company to Microsoft in 2006 and worked there briefly as world-wide head of the BI consulting arm. Now he’s back with his own new company that specializes on providing analytics to the health care vertical. I had met him years ago and introduced him at his section.

Bob mentioned that 5 out of 6 (successful?) projects are now initiated not by the IT shop, but by the business and clinical lines. He focused on the difference between reporting and analytics and offered six examples.

I noticed that his samples documented outliers that exceeded a certain number of standard deviations. Also, he keenly documented how necessary it was for designers to be aware of navigation (drill down, drill to a separate “report”). Some of the data was run through data mining before the user “surfed” on the data.

The other big item was “self-serve” BI, whereas power users have the tools to discover patterns without the need to have the Report Team develop something per a work order request. Bob was particularly critical of the issue of limiting analysis to those trained in SPSS and other statistical power packages. He outlined size examples where analytics (as opposed to operational reporting) uncovered relationships which yielded significant savings and/or put a health care institution back on track with a sound footing.