TCC12 Customer Spotlight: Southern Maine Medical Center

A post from Vanya Tucherov, Tableau QA Engineer, at the Tableau Customer Conference:

First time TCC attendee and analyst Jonathan Drummey of the Southern Maine Medical Center talked about why using Tableau has been empowering for him. It's helped his non-profit hospital group improve patient care, ensure adherence with regulatory standards, and make a difference for healthcare consumers across the state of Maine. The group provides for patients who may need the services from one of nine hospitals served by a network of nearly a thousand physicians.

"The work I do is amazingly fun because it lets me touch every level of our organization, and ultimately help people save lives."

Drummey spends much of his time looking for trends and outliers in healthcare data, and provides reporting for people throughout hospital hierarchies, from the CEO and senior executives to unit, office and practice managerial staff to hospital units, departments and floors, and ultimately to care providers themselves.

The process can sometimes seem daunting. Most of the data he uses comes from Access databases, many of which are painstakingly hand-entered from charge documents. Often, getting the data structured properly to become useful can take up to a day but once the ETL process is complete he's able to meet a variety of reporting needs.

"Even when I only have limited time, being able to work quickly allows me to make the most of it. Tableau makes this possible."

As the 2012 Tableau Customer Conference in San Diego kicks into gear, Jonathan is looking forward to attending sessions on exploring table calculations in depth. He's particularly looking forward to the the Healthcare meetup where he hopes to trade experience and insights with other analysts who work in the field.