Business Intelligence (BI): Your Home Care Agency Guide to Reporting & Insights

Your Home Care Agency Guide to
REPORTING & INSIGHTS
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI)
www.alayacare.com

INTRODUCTION
Home and community care providers are transforming
their businesses to adjust to the tectonic shifts in the
industry. Some of those profound changes faced by
providers are:
• Aging populations with complex chronic
illnesses, which everything else remaining
equal, demands more funds (which are difficult
to come by)
• A shift to bundled reimbursement which
demands quality and health outcome
measures that are difficult to extract and
report against
• Rising labor costs, inefficient utilization and lack
of performance insight compound an industry
under enormous margin compression
Providers need to leverage their systems to do more with
less and the catalyst for this change is to be obsessed
about data driven decision making. Thankfully, the rise of
business intelligence (BI) is unlocking actionable insights
that will dramatically improve home and community care
organizations.
“The home health care
sector is expected to reach
USD 349.8 Billion by 2020,
up from USD 227.5 Billion
in 2015.” 1
www.alayacare.com //2

In the home care industry, the shift to electronic medical
records, digital office systems and cloud computing has
made capturing and compiling large amounts of data
much easier. However, despite having large amounts of
data, home care providers are generally faced with the
challenge of not knowing how to leverage the data
beyond basic reporting. Moreover, in the home and
community care sector in particular, visit, operational
information, and clinical data is often stored in paper
format -- or if it is digital the information resides in
siloed databases. These system deficiencies make it
difficult or near impossible to gain a holistic view of
operations, and eliminates the ability to “pivot” data
which can lead to actionable insights for providers.
A well-orchestrated end-to-end software solution with
integrated BI technology enables your home care
organization to produce meaningful reports and
consequently actionable insights to improve business
processes, make more informed decisions, and provide
more personalized customer experiences. This guide
will help you understand the role of BI in the home and
community care sector and provide you with a few tips
and tricks, to do’s and what not to do’s on how you can
successfully implement a BI tool in your home care
organization.
Business intelligence has been taking the reporting world by storm and is
increasing evidence-based decision making in several industries.
INTRODUCTION

“Business intelligence is defined as getting the right information to the right people at the right time. The term encompasses
all the capabilities required to turn data into intelligence that everyone in an organization can trust and use for more effective
decision making.”
- Bogza, R.M., Acad. of Econ. Studies of Bucharest, 2008.4
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Depending on who you ask, the definition of business intelligence tends to vary across
difference organizations. Here are a few examples of how BI is defined:
“Business intelligence”, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an
organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical
processing, querying and reporting. Companies use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business
opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. CIOs
use BI to identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for re-engineering.”
- Ryan Mulcahy, CIO.com2
“Business intelligence is essentially timely, accurate, high-value, and actionable business insights, and the work processes and
technologies used to obtain them.”
- Swain Scheps, Business Intelligence For Dummies 3

According to John Lloyd, Sr. Physical
Design Engineer at Intel Corporation5
,
these are some of the key components
of a typical BI deployment:
Source Data
Business intelligence begins with all the
data you’re collecting in your home care
agency. As mentioned previously, home
care organizations can now collect large
amounts of data. Source data is all your
data that has yet to be processed. This
data could be coming from sheets of
paper, CRM, EHR, billing and payroll
solutions, scheduling and clinical
documentation solution, or if you’re
ahead of the curve, your single, fully
integrated home care software solution.
Data used for BI could also be coming
from external sources such as social
media, health systems, content and
clinical pathway data or ICD databases.
Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is defined as the
storage unit for all the source data from
your agency systems and applications,
as well as any external data you
intend to analyze. In order to gather
a holistic view of your organizations
data, it first needs to be compiled
from all your sources in one single
container in order to be efficiently
analyzed. If you are constantly
pulling all your data from a variety
of sources for your reporting needs,
which is the general functionality of
most home care software solutions,
it can be disruptive of your
operations and very difficult and
inefficient to analyze.
Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)
Before you go ahead and throw all
your data into a data warehouse,
there is a process referred to as
Extract, Transform, Load (ETL), which
While the overall purpose of business intelligence is to simplify your
agencies data analysis, there are still several complex technologies and
processes involved in transforming your raw data into information you
can easily analyze.

defines the steps you need take to prepare your data for analysis. The process involves exactly what it’s named after,
starting with extracting your agency data from both your internal and external sources, followed by transforming all your
data into a similar format, and then loading the data into your data warehouse.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
OLAP (online analytical processing) is a BI technology that performs reporting and multidimensional analysis. According to
TechTarget, OLAP is defined as the technology behind business intelligence that “enables a user to easily and selectively
extract and view data from different points of view.”6
For example, a home care CFO could request that data be analyzed to
display a spreadsheet showing all of the employees who worked overtime in Manhattan in the month of February,
compared to revenue figures for the agency in January, and then see a comparison of the remaining hour reports in
Manhattan for the same time period. This complex analysis is achieved by creating a cube, defined as, “a data structure that
aggregates measures/facts by every level and hierarchy in the dimensions which need to be analysed.”7
Figure 1.0
The flow of data within
your agency from the
source data to your
buisness intelligence
solution. While the
overall purpose of
business intelligence
is to simplify your
agencies data analysis,
there is still several
complex technologies
and processes involved
in transforming your
raw data into
information you can
easily analyze.

Leading home care providers are recognizing their data
is a treasure trove of insights and meaningful
information for population health, performance
management, benchmarking and work optimization. In
order to locate the right information, it’s not uncommon
for agencies and organizations to perform tedious and
extensive searches through numerous Excel workbooks,
databases, and a variety of solutions that don’t yield
near the same results. With the demand for home care
increasing, agencies and home care organizations are
required to make decisions at a much faster pace in
order to keep up.
With a fully integrated BI tool, agencies can now access
and can pull reports on more information, faster than
ever before. While most agencies have started
collecting data through their electronic solutions, they
often question how to efficiently analyze this data in
order to make effective business decisions. This is where
BI comes into play. BI tools allow agencies to stop sifting
through all of their digital or literal paperwork and focus
on understanding their data. Key stakeholders can
visualize KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and critical
metrics on a dashboard, create ad hoc custom reports,
and quickly find the information they need.
Here are a few benefits of BI that have captured the
attention of home care professionals:
Provides new insights
Having an integrated business intelligence solution can
give key decision makers across all your agency
departments access to insights they’ve never had
before. Important data and customizable reports that
could otherwise take hours and hours to produce can be
brought to the forefront in minutes, providing
actionable information to the right person at the right
time.
Performance improvement tool
From a senior or managerial perspective, business
intelligence tools provide insight into individual
department or employee performance. This
information can be used to help optimize processes or
workflows and to facilitate improved decision making.
Why you should need a BI Tool?
“Companies using analytics
are 5X more likely to make
faster decisions.”8

Reduces costs
With insights developed from your business intelligence
tool, management will have visibility into the weaknesses
of your business such as identifying wasteful spending,
excessive overtime, excess inventory etc. BI will present
your decision makers the information they need in order
to improve efficiencies and otherwise reduce agency costs.
Enables evidence-based approach
As the home care industry shifts to a value-based
reimbursement model, having the appropriate tools in
place to effectively report your outcome or evidence-
focused data couldn’t be more important for your agency.
A business intelligence tool brings important information
to the forefront through KPIs, and allows you to set
priorities and tasks based on your data to ensure you’re
delivering the best possible outcomes. Producing
evidence-based reports has never been simpler.
Predictive outcomes and prevention
Business intelligence technologies have the ability to take
your data analysis to the next level through the use of
predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. Sophisticated
solutions will enable your agency to take a preventative
approach to outcomes through trends, threshold alerts
and risk scores, not only giving key stakeholders visibility
into what’s currently happening, but also what might
happen in the future. With predictive decision-support in
place you can rest assured that you’re taking every
measure possible to deliver better outcomes to your
clients.
See the complete spectrum of BI technologies available in
Figure 2.0.
“85% of business leaders
believe big data will
dramatically change the
way they do business.”9
http://centrix.co.za/business-intelligence-bi-spectrum/

It can sometimes be difficult to spot the signs that your
home care agency needs and could benefit
greatly from BI tools, when you’re busy running a
business and delivering quality care to your clients.
Here are some of the common indicators that it might
be time to start looking into a new solution:
Reporting takes too long
How long does it take you to run a report in your
solution today? Standard home care software solutions
can take hours to push out a report, and can slow down
the entire system along with other agency operations in
the process. If you dream of the idea of pulling reports in
seconds, while your agency continues to run seamlessly
on the same solution, an integrated BI tool could be right
for your organization.
Inconsistent reports across departments
Without the appropriate tools in place, creating reports
that include information across multiple departments
can be a nightmare for most agencies. Systems and
formats tend to vary for different functions and take
forever to combine with traditional reporting tools. If
you’re lacking the freedom to pivot data in meaningful
ways between functions, and be creative with cross-
functional reporting, business intelligence is your
solution. Furthermore, inconsistent reports will
inevitably create doubt and the integrity of the report or
insight will be scrutinized.
Inability to perform in-depth data analysis
Typical home care software solutions are very limited
when it comes to their reporting functionality. Home
care agencies struggle with technology that only offers
precompiled reports with little to no flexibility on the
data they report on. If you’re struggling to get the
information you need out of the solution you have today,
and are restricted to basic queries and search tools, it’s
time to consider looking into a solution with BI
integration.
Agency data is too difficult to compile
If you’re wasting time collecting data from disparate
sources and trying to recompile the data into spread-
sheets just to run a report, this is a very good sign that
your agency is ready for business intelligence. With BI
tools, data from all of your sources and applications live
in a single data warehouse and can be pulled and
compiled with just a few clicks.
Reports don’t use real-time data.
With legacy reporting solutions, chances are the data
you’re reporting on isn’t the most current data.
Traditional solutions can take hours to compile data and
fail to include data that’s collected during the time of
processing. With BI solutions, your raw data is pulled in
real-time, ensuring you’re generating and analyzing the
most up-to-date information.
Signs your agency needs a BI solution

Assess your environment
Before jumping head first into searching for a BI solution,
take some time to assess your agency environment and
your current processes to establish whether or not
business intelligence is right for your organization. Build a
team of cross functional and gather requirements.
Standardize systems
It’s no surprise that having a variety of different systems
and solutions in place can create a massive headache
when it comes to data analysis. Often the more source
data you have, the more complex your reporting
becomes. Having one standard system to run your
agency on might sound impossible now, but there are
fully integrated solutions on the market that can make
your life much easier – especially when it comes to
reporting and business intelligence. Having a limited
number of standardized systems and processes in place
will make implementing a BI solution that much easier.
Engage executives and key stakeholders
Implementing a BI solution is a big step towards
improving your agency’s data analysis, but you still need
to ensure that the people in your organization truly
understand the value of these tools and how beneficial
the visualization of data can be for several stakeholders.
When you’re evaluating your software options, it’s
especially important to consider the usability of the
systems and how easy it is for different departments to
use on a regular basis.
Decide what data you want to analyze
At AlayaCare we always ask our clients, if you had a
crystal ball for your organization, what would you want
to see? It’s imperative to discuss with key stakeholders
in each department what measurements matter to them
and what data they want to see in order to help them
improve outcomes. Having use cases in mind will be
extremely handy when it comes to determining the tools
you need to implement.
Where do I start?
So, you’ve decided BI is something your agency could greatly benefit from – now what?
Here are a few steps to get you started:
“By 2019, 90% of large
organizations will hire a Chief
Data Officer.”10

Persona Sample Reports/Metrics Decision/Action Item
CEO/Owner • Missed Care
• Risk Compliance
• Financial Metrics
Supervisor • Task management
reports
• Proactive reporting on
outstanding paperwork
• Average travel time
Finance/IT • Employee retention
rate
• Employee hour reports
• Billing cycle reports
Field Staff • Variance report on
clock time vs. schedule
time
• Utilization metrics
Scheduler/Coordinator • Referral processing
velocity (how long does
it take to process and
coordinate referrals
• Overtime reports
• Reports for resource
planning and
forecasting
Note: Notice we provided some
sample report metrics that could
apply to various departments at your
agency. Take into consideration what
kind of decisions or action items you
could develop or implement based on
the reports and metrics each
department pulls.
Data Worksheet
Use this spreadsheet as a starting point to help you decide what it is you want to see within your data and throughout
various departments of your agency. Consider having a kick-off meeting with key stakeholders to fill out this worksheet in
order to get a better vision of your data use cases.

Business intelligence is a growing topic in the home care industry.
However, with all of the buzz it’s creating, many agencies have still
not taken steps to implement it—or they have, but are not doing it
well.
But don’t worry. With the proper technology in place, and some time,
effort and the commitment of your team—a BI strategy that is
effective for your organization is more than achievable.
What the future of BI in homecare might look like
Consider this fictitious example of how a home care organization
might benefit from a BI implementation. Agency A is responsible for
managing 20,000 clients with a team of 600 staff and 400 volunteers.
After generating and storing a very large amount of data, Agency A
decided they wanted to start utilizing the information they had to
make operational improvements across the company. With a new
value-based regulation coming into effect in the new year, Agency
A also needed a more efficient way of generating outcome-focused
reports for payers, further validating the need for a BI solution.
With the help of an end-to-end home healthcare software solution
with integrated business intelligence, Agency A can now collect and
efficiently analyze all of its data in real time through a single source
where they previously needed multiple inefficient platforms. The
solution helped to eliminate time consuming data analysis from a
variety of stakeholders, while adding depth and customization to the
reports being generated. Agency A now has insight into both internal
operations such as employee retention rates and referral
processing velocity, and also outcome-focused reports such as
wound care healing percentage and risk prediction reports.
Conclusion

ABOUT ALAYACARE
AlayaCare is a provider of revolutionary cloud-based home healthcare software. With a product spanning clinical
documentation, back office functionality, client and family portals, remote patient monitoring, and mobile care worker
functionality, AlayaCare offers a platform for agencies to propel towards innovation and home care of the future.
AlayaCare offers a new Data Exploration tool through the integration of Pentaho, the leader in data integration and
analytics. Pentaho’s open source-based platform for diverse data deployments enables AlayaCare to provide a suite of
real-time data analytics and customizable reporting for clients and home healthcare agencies around the globe. Agen-
cies are able to more effectively collect, store and manage growing volumes of health data, and make better business
decisions by mining and analyzing this data faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Sources
[1]. Rohan (2015), Home Healthcare Market worth 349.8 Billion USD by 2020. Markets and Markets. Source: http://www.market-
sandmarkets.com/PressReleases/home-healthcare.asp
[2]. Mulcahy, Ryan (2007). Business Intelligence Definition and Solutions. CIO.com. Source: http://www.cio.com/article/2439504/
business-intelligence/business-intelligence-definition-and-solutions.html
[3]. Scheps, Swain (2008). Business Intelligence For Dummies
[4]. Bogza, R.M., Acad. of Econ. (2008). Business Intelligence as a Competitive Differentiator. Source: https://www.computer.org/
csdl/proceedings/aqtr/2008/2576/01/04588724-abs.html
[5]. John Lloyd Sr. Physical Design Engineer Intel Corporation (2011).
Identifying Key Components of Business Intelligence Systems and Their Role in Managerial Decision making. Source:
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/11389/Lloyd-2011.pdf?sequence=1
[6]. Rouse, Margaret (2016). OLAP (online analytical processing). TechTarget. Source: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.
com/definition/OLAP
[7]. Mahender (2015). Business Intelligence | What is Business Intelligence?. ETL Labs.com. Source: http://etllabs.com/definitions/
business-intelligence-so-what-exactly-is-business-intelligence/5463/
[8]. Manyika, James (2011). Big data: The next frontier fro innovation, competition, and productivity. McKinsey&Company. Source:
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation
[9]. Mladjov, Vassil (2015). Report Highlight for Market Trends: Technology Shifts Mean More Venture Capital Investments for
Business Intelligence and Analytics Startups. Gartner. Source: http://www.gartner.com/doc/3137220/report-highlight-mar-
ket-trends-technology
[10]. Parenteau, Josh (2015). Survey Analysis: BI and Analytics Spending Intentions. Gartner. Source: http://www.gartner.com/
doc/3051818/survey-analysis-bi-analytics-spending

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Business Intelligence (BI): Your Home Care Agency Guide to Reporting & Insights

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