Enterprise Healthcare BI 2016
Getting Value from BI Tools—A U.S. and Global Perspective

Health Catalyst develops deep partnerships that combine guidance and consulting with strong training, responsive service, and proactive communication to ensure provider success. A few providers report that Health Catalyst has built additional trust by sharing risk with customers. Dimensional Insight customers say the solution's strong tools help drive outcomes and deliver value, and early adopters of v.7 say the upgrade is a significant improvement. Customers say Epic's usability is still a challenge but that the solution is maturing and that Epic is invested in provider success.

Dimensional Insight delivers value thanks to good development and cost transparency. Information Builders and SAS are also above average when it comes to value. Most other cross-industry vendors struggle to deliver value. SAP's solution is seen as highly complex and requires extensive training to understand, meaning customers are unable to fully leverage it to drive outcomes. Oracle clients struggle with value due to perceived gaps in the solution, which they feel is outdated and receives little development. Providers say Microsoft's poor implementation and training are initial barriers to success and that usability is a challenge in the long term. IBM customers experience difficulty driving outcomes because IBM does not provide the support needed to overcome the system's complexity.

Clients rate Qlik the highest for product usability. Qlik offers a flexible, customizable solution new customers easily understand. Tableau's usability is complemented by excellent training and strong functionality; providers point to the relationship as an area for improvement. The usability of McKesson's visualization tool is improving, closing the gap with Qlik and Tableau. McKesson has performed consistently year over year, fostering trust with providers, who are optimistic about McKesson's future analytics road map.

In a random sampling of providers across the globe, clients reference using Qlik more than any other BI vendor. Customers say Qlik is more complete than other visualization systems, with flexible, agile dashboards for both clinical and nonclinical data. Qlik is top of mind for global providers due to their international footprint and history. Founded in the United States, Tableau is comparatively newer to the global BI market. They are well respected and receive some consideration-providers in multiple regions consider Tableau due to the solution's flexibility. Current users are highly satisfied, reporting that Tableau has helped them improve their clinician performance and supply chain. McKesson's data visualization solution is not actively sold outside the United States.

As data visualization tools become increasingly common, providers still rely on data warehouse vendors to aggregate underlying data. Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and SAS have broad market share and mindshare across the globe due to their cross-industry presence and extensive partner networks. These vendors offer strong financial tools that allow providers to reduce costs but generally do not offer healthcare-specific guidance. A number of local solutions are still in use around the globe, though they are used less frequently than BI solutions that have large, worldwide footprints.

Providers look to their EMR vendors primarily to provide basic clinical reporting and in some cases to supplement other BI tools. The perception among international providers is that Epic provides both an enterprise BI solution and a population health platform. Cerner customers tend to see their vendor's BI solution as a subcomponent of the Cerner population health offering, though Cerner does offer separate BI products. InterSystems' module within DeepSee is used by a limited number of customers. Providers use Allscripts and MEDITECH for basic reporting. Data aggregation is mentioned as a challenge for Allscripts customers.

Many providers hope to leverage their EMR vendor's BI tools to accomplish clinical goals, and several BI/analytics vendors are being adopted for clinical uses as well. Visualization vendors Qlik and Tableau are often used this way due to their solutions' strong dashboards and data aggregation capabilities. IBM is the only cross-industry vendor regularly used clinically, for things like tracking performance and quality. Both in the United States and around the globe, IBM Watson is viewed as a potentially disruptive solution, though the product is still in the testing phase and there are few proof points worldwide.