Homecare Homebase offers out-of-the-box metrics with Tableau

Homecare Homebase’s cloud-based software uses data to inform health care decisions. By integrating Tableau into their product as an OEM partner, Homecare Homebase empowers over 6,000 customers with self-service analytics. We spoke with Homecare Homebase’s Manager of Product Management, Andy Guarnera about how customers use Tableau to:

• Track key metrics
• Share reports across an entire organization
• Accurately project future revenue

Tableau: How long has Homecare Homebase been using Tableau? Andy Guarnera, Manager of Product Management: We've been an OEM partner with Tableau for four years. We needed something that was very simple and easy to deploy. Tableau: How many of your customers are using Tableau? Andy: Being a partner that extends Tableau out to our customers, we have over 6,000 users using the product, either through Tableau Server or Tableau Mobile. Tableau: And how does that work? Andy: We brand our BI offering as Knowledge Link, but our users do know that they're using Tableau and we actually see value in that. Our customers, knowing that as a leading BI analytics software, we want them to know that we're partnered with one of the leading softwares, and that we're offering them the best technology. Tableau: What kind of customers does Homecare Homebase serve? Andy: Homecare Homebase has a pretty wide variety of customers in terms of size. We have everything from a small single agency with 50 patients to large multistate agencies that operate many, many agencies—up to hundreds of agencies. Tableau: Who develops dashboards for your customers? Andy: We have a small team internally that develops dashboards for our customers and also maintains the data warehouse and data sources so that we can keep it as simple as possible for our end customers. Tableau: How has Tableau changed the way that reports are generated? Andy: We're able to actually leverage the security that we have in our core application, which allows certain people to have access to only certain modules or certain branches—operating branches. And so we actually extend that into our data warehouse so we're able to provide Tableau reports that can be filtered down to just single agencies, so that a branch manager is able to look at just their data. And those same reports are able to go all the way up to the CEO of the company and they're able to see the exact same information, but for across the entire organization. Tableau: What kind of metrics are your customers tracking? Andy: The home care and hospice industry is heavily regulated in the sense that the largest payer source is Medicare for the patients. So we've built a lot of things into our product to handle the regulatory side. In Knowledge Link, we've built in a lot of what we call key metrics that allow our customers to track the key drivers that directly influence the reimbursement that they get. So things like revenue per episode and visits per episode and average length of stay for the patients are some really critical metrics to track. Tableau: And has Tableau made that easier? Andy: So we've actually built that into our warehouse and also built some dashboards that span common metrics across all of our customers, and so that right out of the box, as soon as they turn on Knowledge Link and start using Homecare Homebase, they immediately will be able to track all those metrics. Tableau: Can you give me an example of how your customers use Tableau? Andy: One of the dashboards that we do provide for our Knowledge Link customers is the ability to project next year revenue, because Medicare is always coming out with new rules that affect reimbursement. They're able to take their current year revenue and actually project on top of that the rule changes that are going to be coming for the following year.