Importance of business intelligence tool in Healthcare

It’s all about data analytics and how to use it. As business users become increasingly more data-driven and analytics savvy, many want their applications embedded with business intelligence so they can drill down into the data and browse through it on their own — when and where they need it. Sporting self-service capabilities and promising easy-to-use software, embedded BI is gaining popularity in certain quarters. It allows users to assess the performance of their business operations and helps them do their jobs more effectively without the bother of a separate BI application. It’s also a viable option for software vendors that want to increase the value of existing applications or companies looking to monetize their data by creating new products and services built around analytics. But some BI uses make sense for embedded analytics applications and some don’t.

This handbook examines the potential benefits and practical applications of embedded BI. In the first feature, reporters Ed Burns and Craig Stedman observe embedded BI deployments at three companies: two application vendors that embedded reporting and analytics tools into their software and an insurance company that developed a web application to give its visiting nurse practitioners instant access to patient reports. In the second feature Q&A, researcher Howard Dresner, whose company

surveyed more than 1,500 IT, BI and business professionals on their BI and analytics priorities, sizes up the future of embedded business intelligence tools. In the third feature, writer Jack Vaughan reports on a CIO symposium at MIT where data services executives offered advice on ways companies can monetize their data.