Tableau in Healthcare: A Customer’s Perspective

I recently had to opportunity to speak with a new Tableau customer who works at a healthcare company with about 22,000 employees. They had a simple problem: they needed to gain insights from their Oracle database, but they also had a strong need to enhance that data with Excel based documents.

They evaluated over a dozen different products and their solution was Tableau. Why? “There was a huge unmet need in our organization that demanded an easy solution to our analytical processes. Tableau met the unique needs of our users and allowed them to get answers to their data in a quick, simple interface.”

Since many groups within the company had access to Tableau, the results of the deployment quickly began sprouting up across multiple departments.

The research group blended Medicare databases to discover instances where insurance re-registration was needed for certain providers. The HR team used Tableau to analyze the results of an employee satisfaction survey. The visualization above was created by the RVU (relative value unit) analysis team, and is useful in understanding the relative contributions of different care providers. Where each of these groups would have previously needed to develop their own reporting solution, or rely on IT for help, they can now explore and share on the fly without outside help.

Spreading analysis to multiple different teams and hundreds of business users is helpful, but to truly understand the impact of Tableau, one needs to consider the life cycle of each dashboard that is created.

Enabled with rapid drag-and-drop analytics, dashboard designs and revisions go through two or more life cycles within a one week timeframe. During the RVU project displayed above, dashboards were designed, published and reviewed directly on the Tableau Server, allowing changes to be made before the next group meeting. Instead of month long analytic cycles, they are now able to review and update reports twice or even three times weekly.

By enabling everyone with data to evaluate and analyze what matters to them, this organization is empowering analysis and intelligent decision making. This, combined with a rapidly decreased turnaround time during report review cycles, has allowed the organization to respond faster to business needs and more easily achieve their goals.

Eric Berry is a Solution Architect with the Tableau Professional Services team. He helps customers across a variety of industries achieve their goals and hone their analytical skills. He can be reached by email at eberry@tableau.com.