Embedded Analytics

René Descartes

If you got past that title and you are still reading this, thank you!  In all seriousness, we have lots of exciting developments to look forward to as part of the Epic implementation.

For starters, we get to say “Cogito.”  Ask any Epic colleague, and he or she will be happy to correct your pronunciation (KOH-gee-toh) and explain that it’s the name of the overall Epic analytics and reporting platform. It isn’t completely clear why this name was selected, although it was seemingly inspired by philosopher René Descartes’ famous phrase “ego cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am).

Speaking of caveats, as much as we will be able to do with Epic’s integrated electronic health record (EHR) and its embedded reporting tools, it is important to remember that these are still only tools. Lean processes aligned with our strategy and clearly defined metrics are still key drivers for any successful implementation. Therefore, in this post I would like to highlight a few items in two key areas.


1) Data Governance.  Organization-wide Lean efforts and projects such as the GBMC Integrated Data Warehouse have given us several opportunities to discuss and agree to standardized metric definitions. By necessity, the scope has been limited to the areas under consideration. With the broad-ranging Epic implementation, and the time and people dedicated to this effort, we have a unique opportunity to address key measure definitions right from the beginning of the process, communicate accordingly across all entities, standardize and provide ongoing governance. Although some of us might complain about what may be perceived as cumbersome and time-consuming steps, Epic brings to the table well-thought-out and comprehensive project tools for just about every step of the implementation.  We can leverage these tools to ensure that we are identifying and defining key metrics and priority reports. In the near term, steps include workflow adoption meetings and report content sessions.  Whether reviewing application workflows, reports embedded in the screens or back-end reports, our challenge is to maintain consistency in how we input, retrieve and interpret information.

2) Reporting Tools.  At GBMC, we can be proud of having access to state-of-the-art reporting tools such as our existing SAP Business Intelligence reporting platform. This platform, which provides us with tools such as Crystal reports, makes up the front end to our data warehouse and enables us to schedule and distribute reports organization-wide. With Epic, we will continue to leverage those tools. For example, we can use Crystal to author reports through Clarity and use the Web Intelligence query tool for the Cogito Data Warehouse. A huge new advantage to this is that we will now be able to embed a lot of that information up front in near real-time. Reports pulling more than 5,000 records over long periods of time will continue to be generated overnight with tools such as Clarity. But for data pertaining to shorter time frames and fewer records, Epic’s Reporting Workbench and Radar tools now provide us with the capability to display real-time information, for example as a dashboard chart or a table.

Clinical Metric Trends Screenshot

Additionally, Epic will give us the ability to benchmark against other Epic clients as well as against national goals. This opens up a whole array of exciting possibilities. Imagine being able to see key quality outcome metrics, as of today (as opposed to a month ago), on a unit dashboard along with a comparison to benchmarks. During the report content sessions, application report leads (ARLs) from each application team and report writers from the reporting team will begin reviewing the Epic-delivered standard reports with the subject matter experts (SMEs). ARLs will continue to focus on reporting workbench reports, while the centralized reporting staff focuses on Clarity and other report tools.

As Cogito project manager, I will coordinate those efforts. Our challenge will be to identify any critical gaps between the foundation reports and GBMC requirements and to ensure we deliver fully tested and accurate go-live critical reports on Day 1.

I look forward to working with the various stakeholders and helping to answer any questions you may have. And if you think this was an exciting topic, wait till my next post on statistics.

Juan Negrin
Reporting and Analytics Project Manager