After a successful proof of concept, Heon Health OnLine decided to use Tableau to evaluate disease rates for HIV, cancer, and hemophilia. With Tableau, they mapped disease concentration and cost of treatment at a regional level—an effort that was previously not possible. In less than half a day, Heon had several dashboards that were ready for customers’ use. Today, instead of coding custom maps, Heon can create maps by simply dragging and dropping regional fields in Tableau. When Liliana Quintero Cardozo, Director, Business Intelligence speaks to Tableau’s impact on the company, she describes Tableau as being “the best decision we could make.”
Tableau: Why did you purchase Tableau instead of building your own tool? Liliana Quintero Cardozo, Director, Business Intelligence: We were facing a problem; several in fact, that led us to implement Tableau in the organization. One of them was speed. We would have to do a lot of backward development, a huge number of steps in which we spent far too much time to deliver a finished product that was in line with customer needs. So there were many things we realized. Tableau was the best decision we could make because there were many gaps we were unaware of. Tableau: Can you share an example of something you achieved with Tableau? Liliana: The first proof of concept that we did was to identify the accident rate, which is extremely important for a health organization that is reviewing cost versus income. What we did was to conduct this proof of concept by identifying the accident rate at the national level, by region, and for each of the departments, municipalities, through to the IPS level. By identifying this accident rate, which we had not been able to do using other tools, we went a step further and set out to conduct a proof of concept with special programs in which we evaluated diseases, such as HIV, cancer and hemophilia.
With Tableau, the map is already set up...and it was very simple to identify where these diseases were concentrated at a regional level.
Tableau: How did you do this? Liliana: We did this through maps of Colombia, which we had not been able to achieve before either. When we made our first maps of Colombia prior to having Tableau, it was very complicated because we almost had to draw the map. Tableau: How did Tableau streamline your mapping process? Liliana: With Tableau the map is already set up, the geography was ready and it was very simple to identify where the highest cost of these complicated diseases were concentrated at a regional level, and the implementation. Seeing as though we did this so quickly, we launched the third step, which was to make the data top level. We identified all this information and implemented it in no more than half a day with the help of our partner, Tableau. We sat down and said, “here is the tool, use it, fill out the tables with the sources of information.” That morning, IT from 8 am to 12 noon, one of my analysts already had many dashboards ready. Obviously in all my years of work, I never imagined it could be so fast. Tableau: What other benefits have you experienced with Tableau? Liliana: Tableau responded and exceeded our expectations. Most importantly was the financial part; when we were offered Tableau we said to ourselves that this must be worth a lot of money. We were actually surprised by the cost. We made a decision table. The cost was much lower than what we had budgeted with other suppliers of business intelligence tools.