Issues in Health Care Data Analysis

1
Issues in Health Care Data Analysis

• How do we Cultivate the Healthcare Business
  Analyst?
• Mark W. Isken, Ph.D.
• Oakland University
• October 7, 1999

2
The Proposition

• Analysis and modeling without Information
  Technology (IT) falls short of impacting business
  as it could
• IT without analysis and modeling falls short of
  impacting business as it could

3
The Corollary

• Many healthcare process analysis/modeling people
  dont know enough about IT .
• Many healthcare IT people dont know enough about
  processes and modeling.

Lessens Impact on Business
4
Two Convenient Labels

• Systems Analyst
• MIS definition
• Information flow perspective
• IT perspective
• Education
• MIS in Business
• Computer Science

• Operations Analyst
• Operations engineering
• People, material, machines, information flow
• Engineering/process perspective
• Education
• Management science / operations research,
  industrial engineer

5
The Path to this Position

• Indoctrination Period in Ann Arbor
• 10 Years of Observations in the Healthcare
  Industry
• Confirmation from Industry
• Confirmation from Academe

6
Industrial and Operations Engineering _at_
University of Michigan

• Much math, statistics, modeling
• Quite a bit of computer programming
• Two reqd undergrad courses
• Several 400/500 level MIS courses
• Write code to survive in grad school
• IOE and Business School
• Shared students
• Shared courses
• Shared research
• Shared perspective

Programming to be taught by Comp. Science?
7
Management Engineering in Healthcare

• Industrial engineers, nurses and other
  clinicians, business, information systems
• Worked at William Beaumont Hospital, Henry Ford
  Health System and have consulted for numerous
  healthcare institutions
• Analyzing/designing the systems that help
  healthcare work
• Have worked closely with IS professionals
• Models need data
• Embed models in IS applications

8
Systems That Could Be So Much More
ANSOS
EmergiSoft
9
Why Arent They?

• Need more Design for Analysis
• Superficial reporting
• Cumbersome data exporting/access
• Many ignore the difficult problems
• Bookkeeping focus instead of managerial decision
  making focus
• Operations analysts
• Avoid getting dirty (e.g. code, databases, etc.)
• Strained relationship between systems and
  operations analysts
• Not enough Super Users
• A type of specialized business analyst

10
Troubling Anecdotes (Part I)

• Recovery Room Sizing and Staffing
• Inaccessible data
• The r1 problem
• Cardiac Catheterization Lab Inventory System
• How do we set those reorder points?

Management Engineering departments
?
And finally,
11
Troubling Anecdotes (the Sequel)

• MBA/Senior Undergrad Decision Support Systems
  course (almost all working students)
• Excel Pivot Tables
• Serial date/times
• ATiB Survey
• Simulation Lite Process Modeling Tools
• Good and bad
• Weak mathematical and algorithmic thinking skills

12
The Call From Industry

• Wheres the ROI from IT?
• The glamour gone from ERP?
• Process redesign is hard work
• Capacity planning and scheduling still hard to do
• And we still need a data warehouse?
• IT strategy must align with business strategy

13
Business AnalystThe Squishy Job Title
Business analyst is one of the least well-defined
IT titles. Most observers agree that it can mean
a technical person with some business expertise,
or a business person with some technical skills.
"The business analyst is a squishy job title,
but it's important, and those people are hard to
come by," says Tony Graffeo, divisional vice
president for global information services and
head of the internal IT department at Computer
Associates International, in Islandia, N.Y.
"There are technical people who know bits and
bytes but can't speak in end-user terms, and
business people who lack enough technical
expertise to make things happen in IT."
Source Infoworld 1999 compensation survey
www.infoworld.com
14
Promising Signs

• Data warehousing/OLAP/data mining/knowledge
  management Business Intelligence
• Reaffirmation that datavaluable corp. resource
• Emergence of the techno-MBA at elite business
  schools
• Spreadsheet based modeling wave in business
  schools

15
Promising Signs from the Operations Research Field

• OR/MS Today, June 1999 OR IS Scenes from a
  Marriage, p12.
• OR/MS Today, June 1999 OR ERP A Match for
  the New Millennium, p30

16
A Success Story PCS

• Patient Classification System
• System design done by a nurse, operations
  analysts (a generalist and a statistical/database
  wizard), and systems analyst/programmer
• MS Access prototype built by the operations
  analysts
• ORACLE based production system created by the
  systems/analyst programmer

17
The Path From Here

• MIS 300 A Process Focused Course
• EMBA-HCM Healthcare OM Course
• I sing the business analysis song whenever and
  where ever I can and encourage other to sing as
  well!