Narayana Health leverages Power BI to unify data across all units, enabling faster decision making.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, Narayana Health boasts of a network of hospitals across India. Since establishing its first facility of 225 beds in Bengaluru, the group has grown to 5600 operational beds. Today, the group has 24 hospitals, 7 heart centers and a network of primary healthcare facilities across the country. Through its 30 specialties, Narayana Health (NH) delivers high-quality and affordable healthcare services to the broader population.
Business Need
Since its inception, NH has seen a steady growth. From 2 hospitals between 2000 and 2009, the group today has 30+ units and is ranked as the second largest healthcare service provider in the country. However, this growth led to a few challenges.
“With the rise in the number of units, consolidation of data became a challenge. Owing to our management's forethought, our HMS and ERP data was centralized and on the cloud. However, our analytics was decentralized and done at a unit level. This presented challenges in the form of standardization of analytical output as well as the time spent on consolidation of analyses, which took 2-3 weeks after the close of each month, leading to delayed business responses.” Vivek Rajagopal, VP & Head – Business Analytics, NH, said.
As analysts at each of the units did the same work 10 days a month, their capabilities were not being harnessed to the maximum. The presence of a centralized data repository helped immensely as it provided a starting point for the quick adoption of a new solution. Although the data was centralized, it was dispersed across HMS, ERP, MIS, and SAP (HR-related data) solutions.
Solution
To overcome these technology bottlenecks impacting the business, NH decided to leverage Microsoft BI. The solution comprises a suite of analytics tools for analyzing data and sharing insights. Its dashboards provide a complete view for business users involving the most important metrics in real time, at one place, and across all devices.
“We have an enterprise-level database SQL server specifically for BI. The SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) layer fetches data from the various solutions and puts it into this SQL database. The SSIS layer helps in transforming and normalizing the data sets. The SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) layer is where all the metrics are defined,” Rajagopal explained.
The project was launched in May, 2016 and successfully went live in August, 2016. This short implementation timeframe can be attributed to 3 factors – availability of centralized data, NH's robust framework for analytics and, the ease of implementation and intuitive design of Microsoft BI.
Benefits
By unifying analytics across NH's units, Microsoft BI has enabled faster decisions.
“Compared to the earlier situation, now the reports and associated analysis for the entire group are generated within 24 hours, helping us formulate more effective decisions,” Rajagopal said.
The kind of insights delivered by the solution have enabled the analytics team to take the analysis to one level higher. NH is currently working on leveraging Microsoft BI's predictive intelligence capabilities, which will be a key component in their Analytics vertical.
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