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Power BI, Microsoft’s incredibly powerful and easy-to-use data visualization platform — has recently been helping in the fight against COVID-19. Today, let’s look at a few ways innovative healthcare systems are leveraging Power BI to improve quality-of-care, track cases, and save lives.
Consumers produce over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. That’s a lot of data! So, is it really surprising that 73% of data remains unused? In other words, businesses aren’t deriving actionable insights from that data. With so much data at our fingertips, understanding what it means in tangible terms isn’t easy.
That’s where Power BI comes in. Not only does Power BI help you model and visualize data across data sources, but it also leverages world-class AI, best-of-breed reporting features, and an amazing number of integrations to help you understand your data.
That said, it’s difficult to succinctly describe the value of Power BI. The core promise of BI is data visualization. However, the engine is built to handle a variety of data needs, and its natural integration with other Office tools makes it a versatile solution for handling critical business challenges.
To help illustrate the value of data visualization and Power BI, let’s look at how healthcare systems and public entities are leveraging BI to tackle the current challenge of COVID-19.
When you click on your state’s health department website, there’s a good chance you’ll see COVID-19 data for your area. As you browse through the data, do you see a nice map with figures, graphs, and easy-to-digest information? If so, there’s a good chance it was created with Power BI. Microsoft has released a free-to-use interactive tracking solution — powered by Power BI — that public entities can integrate seamlessly into their websites.
This is a great way to see some of the versatility of Power BI. It takes raw data, makes it hyper-visual, and helps you draw meaningful analysis from it. In other words, Power BI helps keep the public informed of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations in their area. It also shows the current positivity rate (based on a 7-day rolling average).
Not only does this bring power and understanding to the increasingly complex nature of public health during a pandemic, but it also helps guide local ordinances and public decisions.
Healthcare systems are losing over $50 billion in revenue per month during this pandemic. Presently, supply chain frictions, COVID-19 hospitalization costs (which can cost upwards of $80,000 for the hospital), and PPE woes are eating into revenue streams. In addition, hospitals were also forced to pause elective surgeries for a few months at the beginning of the pandemic.
The latter exerted a downward pressure on revenues and put patients in a vulnerable position. Despite the term “elective,” many of these procedures were critical to the health and safety of individuals across the United States.
While most hospitals are now free to resume elective surgeries, many are facing a new problem: how to begin tackling a massive backlog of surgeries. Between prioritizing and managing elective surgeries in light of new health and distancing guidelines, the nuanced decisions that go into resuming these surgeries can add new stresses to already burdened healthcare teams.
Fortunately, the answer to discovering solid surgery workflows lies in the data. But, how do you visualize that patient data to make accurate and actionable decisions?
You guessed it: The answer is Power BI. Hospitals like Phoenix Children’s Hospital are using Power BI to visualize surgery data to help them make more impactful decisions.
“Besides the delay in surgery for the patient, deferring all elective surgeries put a major financial strain on hospitals across the country. The challenge we had to address was how to resume the thousands of deferred surgeries, in addition to the new surgeries that were being added each day.” — Dr. Vinay Vaidya, CMO at Phoenix Children’s Hospital
This new Power BI-fueled dashboard allows surgeons to review cases, mark priorities, and visualize surgery flows to help them reduce a +3,000 surgery backlog. “Using a careful and well-planned approach, a surgical prioritization was developed and uniformly communicated to all surgical teams,” says Dr. Vaidya. In addition, the dashboard was simultaneously fed COVID-19 data, which they used to help understand how and when to test incoming patients for COVID-19 during the surgery workflow.
While COVID-19 is a fantastic example of how Power BI can quickly scale data mapping and visualization to garner immediately viable results (which is critical during pressure events like a pandemic), mapping is only one small example of Power BI’s overall value proposition.
Did you know that the average business will lose $9.7 million per year due to poor data quality? The business space talks a lot about finding ways to generate and gather data, but how do you actually take advantage of the data you already have?
The modern data architecture is complex. The convergence of data lakes, S3 buckets, SaaS apps, legacy servers, and clouds can quickly become overwhelming. However, when the majority of your data sits in siloed buckets and repositories, you’re losing money. Power BI helps you quickly visualize all of your data sources to bring meaningful business intelligence to your fingertips.
At Nexinite, we help businesses build incredible Power BI solutions with best-in-class consultancy, Microsoft licenses, and powerful migrations. As Microsoft Partners, we’re ready to help you take the next step. Don’t let your data spiral out-of-control or the next business emergency upend your daily operations. Contact us to get started with the world’s foremost business intelligence tool. When you need to solve a problem fast, Power BI gives you the answers you need.
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