Kaleida Health, the largest healthcare provider in western New York, has more than 10,000 employees, five hospitals, a number of clinics and nursing homes, and a visiting-nurse association that deals with millions of patient records. Kaleida’s traditional reporting tools were inadequate to handle the growing data, and they were faced with the challenge of finding a business intelligence tool that could handle large data sets effortlessly, quickly, and with a much deeper analytic capability. At Kaleida, many of the calculations are now done in Tableau, primarily pulling the data from Oracle databases into Excel and importing the data into Tableau. For many of the monthly analytic reports, data is directly extracted into Tableau from the data warehouse; many of the data queries are saved and rerun, resulting in time savings when dealing with millions of records—each having more than 40 fields per record. Besides speed, Kaleida also uses Tableau to merge different tables for generating extracts.
Using Tableau, Kaleida can analyze emergency room data to determine the number of patients who visit more than 10 times a year. The data often reveal that people frequently use emergency room and ambulance services inappropriately for stomachaches, headaches, and fevers. Kaleida can manage resource utilizations—the use and cost of supplies— which will ultimately lead to efficiency and standardization of supplies management across the system. Kaleida now has its own business intelligence department and uses Tableau to compare itself to other hospitals across the country. Comparisons are made on various aspects, such as length of patient stay, hospital practices, market share, and partnerships with doctors.

Questions for Discussion
1. What are the desired functionalities of a reporting tool?
2. What advantages were derived by using a reporting tool in the case?