Business intelligence tools give healthcare organizations the ability to analyze data to make better informed business and clinical decisions. Some of these products are even suited for healthcare providers that don't have the time or resources to build large data warehouses.The Cancer Center of the Carolinas, a 24-physician, 10-location oncology practice in upstate South Carolina, has been using business intelligence products for several years, first to gain insight for business and operational decision-making, and more recently for clinical research related work.

CCC's use of Monarch business intelligence tools from Chelmsford, Mass.-based vendor Datawatch is assisting the organization in identifying treatment trends, figuring out where to open new care facilities and the mix of services to offer, reducing the number of claims that get denied from payers due to coding or other errors, and matching patients with the most appropriate clinical trials faster.

Unlike business intelligence tools from many other vendors that analyze data from data warehouses, Datawatch's Monarch relies on output data from reports--Monarch gathers the output data from reports and other documents, analyzes that data and disseminates it.

In the past, CCC 's monthly reporting process would be a three-day event often requiring the "lock down" of the organization's EMR, practice management and other systems as data was compiled and "canned" reports were run, said Sophia Charles-Irby, CCC business service analyst. But with using Monarch, monthly reporting now takes about a day, and CCC can also quickly perform ad hoc data analysis, pulling and analyzing data from existing reports, as well as spreadsheets and SQL database table and views, she said.

"We use existing output data of all computers systems as sources. We extract data from soft copy reports," said Tom Callahan, who recently joined Datawatch as product manager for health solutions. Callahan had previously held principal consultant positions at Edgewater Technology and Keane.

Typically, report data is "static and frozen and is generally needs to be rekeyed for different formats," he said. However, Monarch's technology extracts the report output data and converts it to raw data for analysis "that's user friendly and low cost," he said.

"We take data out of reports and allow you to analyze it more quickly" than relying on a data repository," he said. Monarch's use in healthcare environment addresses "pain points" that include integrating data from disparate financial, clinical and operational systems and the difficulties of extracting and disseminating data that's most useful to specific users such as nurse managers and financial analysts, he said.

Another pain point Monarch addresses is the fact that smaller healthcare providers, including doctor practices, don't have the budget or IT staff necessary to build and support data warehouses necessary for analysis by many other BI tools, he said.

Monarch's technology takes data from output reports, such as the list of medication errors reported by a clinical system, and allows users to analyze that and other data, including zeroing in the days or shifts errors occurred, and the sorts of adverse drug interaction or medication that were involved in the mishaps, said Callahan.

The Monarch reporting doesn't require a lot of IT support, he said.

"Our tools are more self sufficient and self service, we push 'what if' capabilities to the user," he said.

"Smaller hospitals --those with 350 beds or less--can pull data from reports" to utilize the analytics provided by Monarch, said Callahan.

Meanwhile larger hospitals and healthcare providers with "lots of systems and big repositories" also can use Monarch's tools to complement other analysis, he said

While pricing varies depending on the number of licensed seats, Monarch desktop products run about $700 to $800 per seat, and about $40,000 to $50,000 for an enterprise system. "We're much cheaper and easier to implement" than competing business intelligence systems that rely on "large repositories," he said.

CCC is using Monarch to generate reports to help physicians and researchers identify the best patient candidates for clinical trials, which are important part of the care that individuals can receive at CCC, said Dawn Smith Brenneman, CCC director of operational excellence and marketing.

About 6% of CCC patients participate in clinical trial, which is about double the average 3% to 4% of patients nationally who participate in clinical trials, she said.

Without the Monarch tools, the e-medical records of thousands of individual CCC patients would need to be checked in order to find patients that fit the specific requirements of various clinical trials, such as age, gender, stage and type of cancer, previous treatments received, lab test values, and other key characteristics, said Charles-Irby.

"I work closely with the research department," said Charles-Irby. "The speed of how these systems process [the analysis] is the best thing" about using the tools, she said.

Datawatch's other markets include manufacturing, retail, government and finance. At the end of last year, healthcare was about 10% of sales. However, with the healthcare sector being "awash in paper" and the government push for providers to deploy and use health IT meaningfully, there's a lot of growth potential in that segment, said Callahan.

That'll be especially be true when healthcare providers in Stage 2 of the fedreal government's meaningful use criteria are expected to be required to transmit quality data to CMS.

"Our products will flourish in Stage 2," he predicts.

The federal government recently released requirements that doctors and hospitals must meet to qualify as meaningful users of electronic health records and be eligible for incentive funds. We take a look at the core requirements, the government's intentions, potential pitfalls, and reaction from the medical community. Download the report here (registration required).