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What to Ask When Hiring a Business Intelligence Expert

By Laura Madsen

These days you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a health care business intelligence (BI) expert. The advent of the Affordable Care Act, EHRs, and the increasing need for reliable data analytics in all corners of the health care industry has given birth to legions of so-called BI experts and the sharply rising need among clinics and organizations to hire someone fast.

So how do you separate self-proclaimed experts from real expertise in health care BI? Ask these five foolproof questions of your BI partner (and yourself), and they’ll get any organization on the right tracks quickly.

1. Are they part of the gold rush? The demand for data analytics across the health care industry has grown so rapidly that the last few years has seen something of an expert gold rush as consultants have flooded the market. But much like the panhandling days of old, you can’t just go where the crowd is because you won’t find gold that way.

Put aside the urgency your clinic or organization may feel to bring in BI help as quickly as humanly possible and dig deep. BI is a young discipline, but your chosen expert needs to have a solid track record of at least five years and case studies of proven programs to show you.

2. Are they consultants or commanders? Does your chosen health care BI provider know how to implement and manage a BI program kickoff and installation or does he or she prefer to offer strategic advice? Conceiving, launching, and nurturing a BI program that fits your big-picture strategy but integrates into every facet of your organization is a time-consuming and incredibly challenging but ultimately rewarding endeavor. Does the BI provider have the experience to offer only strategic whiteboard advice or can he or she roll up his or her sleeves, integrate with your IT department, and really steer a course through the months of BI program implementation?

3. Are they one team minded? Before you do anything else, ensure that your chosen provider and future health care BI partner is a team player, someone who understands organizational needs, motives, and pressures from the C-suite floor to the backrooms of the IT department. A good BI partner can straddle these different mindsets and create a single vision from manager to IT department for the implementation of an organizationwide BI program and process. No BI program can exist without this.

4. Are they data architects? In other words, does your health care BI partner have the skill set and bandwidth to collate, organize, and make accessible the massive amounts of data your organization generates on a daily basis? Does the BI have airtight data quality standards in place and protocols for collecting and working with data for best in class results? Ultimately, the success of your BI implementation and its role in operational efficiency comes down to data quality, collection, and analysis. Everything else builds from there. Before hiring any health care BI expert, you should always ask whether the candidate understands how your organization functions and, in doing so, can he or she design and build an architecture exactly tailored to those functional needs.

5. Do they have a strong visualization offering? Some health care BI experts do offer back-end data analytics capabilities, but given the stresses, time constraints, and daily priorities of employees within the typical health care environment, daily success comes down to user interface with that data. A stellar visualization strategy that caters to how all employees at different levels will need to access, understand, and use the data is critical. A C-suite executive may only need headline facts and figures, where a midlevel or departmental head needs only a broader cross-section of data.

But regardless of employee user audience, your health care BI partner needs to be able to design for the user to create a custom interface experience that caters to the speed, location, and duration with which employees need to interact with the data. Only by creating an interface geared specifically to real people doing real jobs and overlaying it on robust, high-quality data can your health care BI program and the partner providing it ever truly paint the full picture for your organization.

— Laura Madsen is a speaker and expert on business intelligence programs in the health care industry and the author of Healthcare Business Intelligence: A Guide to Empowering Successful Data Reporting and Analytics.