Your initial discussion thread is due on Day 3 (Thursday) and you have until Day 7 (Monday) to respond to your classmates. Your grade will reflect both the quality of your initial post and the depth of your responses. Refer to the Discussion Forum Grading Rubric under the Settings icon above for guidance on how your discussion will be evaluated.

Go through the Excel tutorial provided on the following link: Excel Database Creation Tutorial (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Using the information from your readings in the overview, choose one of the headings (e.g., Providers, Payers, and so forth) and create a simple database using the information you learned from the excel tutorial and the CSBI materials. Explain how the rows and columns you created would help you further analyze the information. Submit the database with explanation of how a database is created and how it functions.

Guided Response: Review several of your classmates’ initial posts, and respond to at least three of your peers. Critique your peers’ database by pointing out strengths and politely pointing out any weaknesses. Suggest any possible alterations that might improve their database. Justify your suggestions with rationale that they may not have considered. You are encouraged to post your required replies earlier in the week to promote more meaningful and interactive discourse in this discussion. Monitor the forum through Day 7 to allow for robust dialogue

This table can assist numerous stakeholders of information. It is keeping track of a Providers daily appointments from start to finish, patient information, the type of appointment, insurance plan used, and type of appointment. This is all information that can be used to track patient demographics, insurance carriers commonly used, and the types of the most common appointments seen. In this table you are able to determine if a provider is busy, and when you have multiple providers you can see who does more patient care than others and help balance out the work. For patients this table can help keep track of information for contact purposes, whether or not you attended appointments, and the insurance that is on file. That way if there is a problem with billing it can be easily identified and rectified.Insurance information can be kept track of to see if patients arrived, length of appointments, and demographics. You can add or remove tabs as needed to work with specific offices. One may even put diagnosis codes in the system or add co-pays or billing information. Anything that may be used to help improve operations within the office.

MHA605 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Welcome to Week Four

There are many stakeholders in healthcare. One group of stakeholders is the providers.  Understanding the role of each provider is essential to understanding the impact each has on the strategic planning process.  Defining healthcare providers is relatively simple, but can also be complicated. A healthcare provider can be a person or a business that delivers healthcare services.  In other words, when a patient needs care or services, it is providers that will be able to service the patient.  Other names for providers include physicians, nurses, doctors, and pharmacists.  The U.S. National Library of Medicine (2016) defines providers and includes, but is not limited to (“Types of health care providers: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia,” 2016):

• Primary Care
• Nursing Care
• Drug Therapy
• Specialty Care

The easiest way to think of providers is to walk through a patient’s visit/stay in a hospital.  If an emergency, and the patient is transported by emergency management services (EMS), then one of the providers would be the EMS.  When the patient reaches the hospital, he/she is triaged by a nurse (provider) and then seen by the physician (provider).  Specialists (providers) may be called in depending on the severity of the case.  The providers have a need for analytics for decision making within their areas, and decisions that may impact the rest of the organization.

Strategic planning is something that should be done on a short-term and long-term basis.  During the strategic planning process, each of the patient care areas, and those that support the financial and operational side of the healthcare organization, will determine what their needs are going to be for the next year, and next few years.  In order to analyze the impact of each department or area, information is needed.  The needs can be analyzed through customized information that is retrieved through a business intelligence tool.  Once things such as number of patients seen, procedures run, and other metrics have been determined, the analysis can be stored through a database tool and presented using a tool such as a spreadsheet.

There are a variety of technology tools used to create and maintain databases.  Understanding the basic layout of databases allows the creation of a simple database for use with analysis.  Thinking about a database as a way to store and retrieve information for further use, imagine how patient information can be used.  For each piece of information, there is a field that stores this information.  When a report is needed to show this information, each field that contains the information you want to pull and sort can be selected, then presented in a variety of ways.  For example, the VP of Nursing may want to know how many patients have the same diagnosis and are between certain ages, you can pull the diagnosis field and the age field.  You wouldn’t necessarily need to pull the patient info, and by not having the patient identifiers, it would prevent a HIPAA violation.  Knowing this information may lead to further analysis to help determine the reason for the commonality.  The VP of Marketing may want to know the number of patients that are coming from a particular zip code area, or demographics such as gender and age.  This information would help them determine their target or niche market for advertising and outreach.  The VP of Patient Financial Services may want information about how quickly insurance companies (third-party payers) are paying, or how often they are denying the claim.  Receiving payments in a timely manner can greatly impact the revenues, which can impact the monies available for payroll, operations, and capital purchases.  Using business intelligence as a tool for strategic planning can be helpful in a variety of ways.

References

Types of health care providers: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia. (2016, May 3).  (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.Retrieved from https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001933.htm

Required Resources

Text

Davenport, T. H. (Ed). (2014). Analytics in healthcare and the life sciences: Strategies, implementation, methods, and best practices. Upper Saddle River, NJ: International Institute for Analytics, Pearson Publisher. ISBN 13: 9780133407334

• Part IV: Overview of Healthcare Analytics Best Practices Across the Ecosystem. These textbook readings will provide assistance with the CSBI exam and the discussion question by helping the student understand why spreadsheets and databases are useful in presenting best practice analytics.

Web Page

French, T. (2016). How to create a database in Excel (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Retrieved from http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/datamanagementinexcel/ss/excel_database.htm

• This resource provides the basics of how to use Microsoft Excel to create a database for management of critical data and will provide information to assist in the discussion question on database creation.

Website

Healthcare Financial Management Association (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.hfma.org/

• The Healthcare Financial Management Association is an organization of healthcare finance leaders that builds and supports coalitions with other healthcare associations and industry groups to face the challenges the U.S. healthcare system faces today. This website will provide assistance with your CSBI exam preparation and your assignment. Accessibility Statement does not exist
  Privacy Policy (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.