Healthcare Staffing Company

Real-Time Analytics for Healthcare Staffing.

An Overview

The Challenge

A healthcare staffing company wanted to visualize and measure key business metrics to enable better decision-making.

The Solution

Before this engagement, the data and reports they needed could take months to get, were out-of-date by the time they got them, and were often inaccurate.

The Outcome

2nd Watch built a modern data platform that centralized data from throughout the organization and presented user-friendly dashboards for near real-time analytics for healthcare.

01

Overview

In the healthcare industry the ability to assess the current and future staffing needs for healthcare workers is critical to providing top-quality patient care. Executives need to feel confident that the data they’re using to make decisions is trustworthy, up-to-date, and available when needed.

Our healthcare staffing client wanted to improve their ability to make data-driven decisions but first needed support moving from their current state of inaccessible data, time-consuming reporting, and poor data governance. They turned to the healthcare data and analytics strategy team at 2nd Watch to help them build a modern data and real-time analytics solution that would scale as they grow.

02

The Solution

The 2nd Watch healthcare data and analytics strategy team worked closely with the client’s executives and stakeholders to understand their current challenges, business goals, and the metrics they needed to see. With this information in mind, the team designed and implemented an end-to-end data strategy that:

  1. Established the most important and relevant data for their needs.
  2. Defined and documented terms, metrics, and KPIs to ensure consistency throughout the organization.
  3. Enabled quick and easy access to the data they need at the time they need it.
  4. Was scalable for additional data sources, advanced analytics, and future growth.

Scalable Data Centralization

To make this solution a reality, we loaded all raw versions of source data into a Snowflake cloud data warehouse. This centralized the data into one location and enabled the use of modern cloud-based reporting tools. The ingestion solution is scalable and modular, so it significantly reduces load time and effort required to add a new data source.

A Holistic View of the Business

Within Snowflake, we created a business layer to model data and match business domains. For each business domain, we combined their three main sources of data to provide a holistic view of their business, applying business rules where necessary.

A Single Source of Truth

We also created a reporting layer off of the business layer to be used in some Power BI reports. The reporting layer centralized KPI calculations to maintain one version of the truth for different reports. It also summarized data for easy and fast reporting.

User-Friendly Operational Dashboards

Finally, we developed two new operational dashboards for the client, leveraging the new business and report layers. They visualized key metrics at a summary level but also enabled users to drill down in ways they were previously unavailable. These operational dashboards are available on their report server, so users can access them any time they want. Additionally, we implemented row-level security on the client’s most widely used dashboard, so offices were only able to see their data.

03

The Result

Prior to engaging with 2nd Watch, accessing the metrics executives needed required submitting a request to the IT team to gather the information from their source systems, then waiting for them to produce the report. The process was slow and the data was often unreliable.

As a result of this modern data and real-time analytics solution, the executive team and other business users are able to run their own reports and visualize key operational metrics that they can trust. They are able to access information in dashboards quickly without having to go back to the IT team for every request. This enables them to make fast and informed decisions on accurate and up-to date information.

Additionally, the client was able to grow their business intelligence team and hire more analysts now that their data was clean, accessible, and reliable.