Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

BI in Health Care—and Everywhere Else

In which Jill observes that the maxim, “Physician, heal thyself” can have several meanings.

Several years ago, Baseline Consulting received a blind Request for Proposal from an HMO. The RFP was for help building a BI strategy. Right up our alley. Trouble was we didn’t have many references in the healthcare sector. At that time our largest competitor had a practice dedicated to healthcare. While Baseline routinely won competitive bids in retail, financial services, gaming, insurance, communications, and other verticals, our competitor had healthcare locked up.

Moreover, like many consultants and vendors, we tend to be suspicious of blind RFPs. Being asked to answer a lot of complicated questions, and even divulge some IP, by a prospect where there is no pre-existing relationship, no referral, and no attempt at personal outreach can be a dicey proposition. One BI vendor of note refuses to even entertain blind RFPs. “When you get something out of the blue like that, it usually means you’re column-fodder,” their sales executive said recently. Blind RFPs are like the guy on the Times Square side street who wants to show you some nice Rolexes. You want to check them out, but you’re dubious.

The combination of these two factors led us to send the HMO’s contact a polite “thanks anyway” note, congratulating them for realizing the promise of BI in an information-rich industry, and wishing them luck on their BI journey.

Surprisingly our V.P. of Client Services received a call from the HMO contact right after she received our no-bid notice. Danielle was the HMO’s BI Program Director, and she was insistent. “We really want a proposal from Baseline,” Danielle said.

Our V.P. thanked her and explained that we were pretty sure who the competition was, and that we didn’t have their healthcare industry chops and thus had decided to forego the proposal process. But Danielle was unrelenting. She made her case, firmly explaining that the HMO’s evaluation process was multi-dimensional and involved more than just healthcare expertise. We would be given a fair shot at the business.

So we bid it, proposing our BI Portfolio service and roadmap, and waited for the inevitable “thanks anyway” e-mail. Instead, we received an e-mail from the HMO’s procurement manager informing us that we’d won.

In a meeting with the HMO’s CIO a few weeks later, still dazed by our unexpected success, we asked about their consulting evaluation process. We’d been honest about our lack of healthcare experience, and wondered why they’d picked us in spite of it.

The CIO replied, “You guys don’t get it, do you? You won because you DON’T know healthcare.”

My team and I could only look at one another.

 “What impressed us was your experience with customer intelligence,” the CIO continued. “You guys showed examples of the value of the 360-degree view of customer, customer profiling, and tracking a customer across his or her relationship with a retailer. That’s exactly what we need to do with our patients. We want your knowledge of retail. Honestly, that’s where healthcare’s headed.”

The CIO didn’t know how prescient he was. In the subsequent engagement and several more after that, we learned that applying customer intelligence principles from the retailers, banks, gaming companies, and other industries we’d worked with was nothing less than innovative in healthcare. After all, the idea of a  customer relationship lifecycle, with its myriad channels and touchpoints, mirrors the continuum-of-care goal of most of today’s healthcare providers . And all the user adoption challenges we’d seen in other industries paled in comparison to those in healthcare where physicians—notoriously set in their ways—now use BI to make smart decisions about patient care—not in an office or a cubicle, but at the bedside.

In an increasingly competitive industry where disruptive new entrants are taking healthcare administrators by surprise and the question of wholesale reform is not an “if” but a “when,” the patient-centric view is nothing less than strategic.  “We don’t need experience in healthcare,” the CIO concluded. “As it is, we already have more than enough ourselves.”

Photo by carlsonimkeller (via Flickr)

A Letter to Our Users, From Your BI Team

In which Jill writes a rebuttal letter to a rebuttal letter, this time from IT.

 

Two posts ago, I penned a fictitious (albeit observation-based) letter from a group of BI business users to their IT comrades. The post got lots of hits and tweets, many of them gently requesting equal time. (Okay, demanding it.) So I’m putting my IT cap back on and diving headfirst into the fray once again, this time with a rebuttal from the BI team.

Dear BI Users:

Thanks for your letter and for taking the time to write it. Sometimes we’re not sure you even know we’re here. In fact we’re working hard, and we’re grateful for any type of feedback.

Speaking of which, we invited you all to a Lunch & Learn session last Thursday where we presented a prototype of the Customer Event Management solution you’ve all been asking for. We’re one step closer to predicting the churn of high-value customers, but we need your input. Most of you accepted the meeting invitation, but only four of you showed up. What happened?

Okay, we don’t want to seem defensive but if you don’t feel listened to, well, neither do we. We understand that you’re not wild about those architecture and infrastructure conversations, and we try to shield you from that stuff whenever we can. But sometimes we need your approval for investments in foundational technologies. If IT indeed supports the business, both sides need to know what’s being supported.

But since you asked, we’ll tell you where we’ve been. We’ve been trying to explain to you that we can’t develop the custom software you’ve requested for a packaged price. It seems you all want Microsoft Office-quality tools, but we have a nine-person BI team here! And, not to burst your bubble or anything, but here it is:  there’s really no such thing as BI-in-a-box. All BI work is custom development. So, to answer your question for the 99th time: No, we can’t just “plug and play.”

We’ve also been delivering the 24x7 support you’ve wanted—or haven’t you looked at the SLAs we created? This stings a little, since we’re on call day and night. You don’t know this because you’re fast asleep while we’re loading your data and upgrading systems to support your requirements. After all, there are nine of us on the team, yet you want operational-class support. How many people staff members are involved in building our operational systems? (Answer: More than nine.) But we can’t get you guys to come look at the stuff we’re building for you. At lunchtime. With sandwiches.

Our conundrum is this: the business funds IT, so we’re beholden to you for money. Yet when we want to make sure your money is used well, we can’t get you to share where you’re going, let alone evaluate the solutions you’ve asked us to build!

And believe us, we’d like to fix the data as much as you would. But we don’t own the data, the operational systems developers do. And they say no one ever complains about it. Seriously, we are only as effective as the data we get from those systems and our understanding of the rules needed to fix it. We could put you guys in touch with our Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable system developers and you can get them to write your reports. No? We didn’t think so.

Look, we’re happy to rethink the way we work together, to define new rules of engagement. We’re even happy to fund a resource to shadow you while you do your jobs so we don’t have to keep on asking you what’s next. But we need you to meet us halfway. Shoot, we need you to meet us, period. How about lunch?

You know where to find us,


Your BI Team

Photo by footage (via Flickr)