Why analytics pros should be part of your enterprise data warehouse project

Simply building an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) for a healthcare organization won't make it successful, writes Cincinnati Children's Hospital's Yiscah Bracha at healthsystemCIO.com.

Making it an IT project is a mistake, says Bracha, assistant vice president of quality improvement healthcare analytics at the hospital. She urges CIOs to consult with the staff analytics pros--the warehouse's most likely customers--and, in fact, let them lead the project.

In a similar vein, Texas Children's Hospital is claiming success in using data warehousing and analytics with quality improvement teams that are not led by the IT department. One of its first success stories involved using the analytics applications' drill-down capabilities to apply best practices to improve treatment of asthma, as FierceHealthIT previously reported.

Analytics experts can tell IT the kinds of data that should be baked into the EDW, such as length of stay, readmission rate and payer type, Bracha writes.

"If the EDW contains the data we need in a form that is easy for us to analyze, we will flock to it. And the best way to know what content we need and what structure is easy to analyze is to collaborate with us as you build." 

To learn more:
- here's Bracha's article