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Chapter 1 • An Overview of Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Decision Support 51

all relevant data in a form that enables appropriate reporting and analysis. Usually
development of this data infrastructure is part of data warehouses, which we study in
Chapter 3. From this data infrastructure we can develop appropriate reports, queries,
alerts, and trends using various reporting tools and techniques. We study these in
Chapter 4.
A significant technology that has become a key player in this area is visualization.
Using the latest visualization tools in the marketplace, we can now develop powerful
insights into the operations of our organization. Application Cases 1.2 and 1.3 highlight
some such applications in the healthcare domain. Color renderings of such applications
are available on the companion Web site and also on Tableau’s Web site. Chapter 4
covers visualization in more detail.

Application Case 1.2

Eliminating Inefficiencies at Seattle Children’s Hospital
Seattle Children’s was the seventh highest ranked for patient waiting. They found that early delays
children’s hospital in 2011, according to U.S. News cascaded during the day. They focused on on-time
& World Report. For any organization that is com- appointments of patient services as one of the solu-
mitted to saving lives, identifying and removing the tions to improving patient overall waiting time and
inefficiencies from systems and processes so that increasing the availability of beds. Seattle Children’s
more resources become available to cater to patient saved about $3 million from the supply chain, and
care become very important. At Seattle Children’s, with the help of tools like Tableau, they are find-
management is continuously looking for new ways ing new ways to increase savings while treating as
to improve the quality, safety, and processes from many patients as possible by making the existing
the time a patient is admitted to the time they are processes more efficient.
discharged. To this end, they spend a lot of time in
analyzing the data associated with the patient visits. Questions for Discussion
To quickly turn patient and hospital data into 1. Who are the users of the tool?
insights, Seattle Children’s implemented Tableau 2. What is a dashboard?
Software’s business intelligence application. It pro- 3. How does visualization help in decision making?
vides a browser based on easy-to-use analytics to the 4. What are the significant results achieved by the
stakeholders; this makes it intuitive for individuals to use of Tableau?
create visualizations and to understand what the data
has to offer. The data analysts, business managers, What We can Learn from this application
and financial analysts as well as clinicians, doctors, case
and researchers are all using descriptive analytics This Application Case shows that reporting analyt-
to solve different problems in a much faster way. ics involving visualizations such as dashboards can
They are developing visual systems on their own, offer major insights into existing data and show how
resulting in dashboards and scorecards that help a variety of users in different domains and depart-
in defining the standards, the current performance ments can contribute toward process and qual-
achieved measured against the standards, and how ity improvements in an organization. Furthermore,
these systems will grow into the future. Through the exploring the data visually can help in identifying
use of monthly and daily dashboards, day-to-day the root causes of problems and provide a basis for
decision making at Seattle Children’s has improved working toward possible solutions.
significantly.
Seattle Children’s measures patient wait-times Source: Tableausoftware.com, “Eliminating Waste at Seattle
and analyzes them with the help of visualizations Children’s,” tableausoftware.com/eliminating-waste-at-seattle-
to discover the root causes and contributing factors childrens (accessed February 2013).

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