This analysis provided us with a road map to improve patient care. We have begun retraining our telephone schedulers to recognize more easily the opportunities for patients to use our urgent care clinic rather than our specialized clinics, so that we can keep scheduled appointments running on time.

Build on Early Success
We then compared the cost and benefits of obtaining other valuable deliverables. In this step, we looked primarily for the opportunity to reuse solutions. For example, we used data about our IT help desk performance to design a simple workflow solution to streamline this function. Now we're redeploying that same workflow engine to create a partially automated employee on-boarding application, a time sheet solution, a staff skill set knowledge base, an e-forms library and a reporting repository. This became the foundation for later phases of BI, allowing for a modular approach. While many tools can accomplish this, Microsoft's Sharepoint made the most sense for us.

Because each phase was built on the success or failure of the preceding phase, our plan had to remain flexible enough to adapt to changing goals and priorities as well as to developments in the project itself. For example, in the course of deploying the help desk workflow solution, we discovered we could automate a report of call volume to the help desk. This led us to conclude that running the same report for another call center could deliver an even greater value to the call center manager and the individuals focusing on patient wait time.

By carefully evaluating each step and phase for positive value and added value, we have been able to maximize the value delivered, minimize the cost, and provide tools for uncovering hidden value in a fiscally responsible way. In financial terms, the marginal, or additional, benefits we gained in each phase had to exceed the marginal costs to build any new functionality.

Using this modular approach, we've been able to stack needs to open up new opportunities. We quickly reached a point where many of the reports we were generating became key performance indicators for the practice. So now we're starting on a dashboard capability to show these metrics in near real-time. To have simply started with the goal of a dashboard report would have been cost prohibitive.

Starting small also had an unexpected benefit. It allowed users more opportunities to provide important feedback on which information was delivering value, and it got them excited about the capabilities of our growing BI options. Now that the cat is out of the bag with our business unit leaders, they're starting to look for more strategically relevant information.