Why Yellowfin is the BI platform of choice in the healthcare industry

We’ve got a lot of customers in the healthcare space. It’s a really interesting space to be in from an analytics perspective because our customers are based across the world and have a wide variety of use cases - from financial administration all the way through to hospital performance and risk metrics.

Analytics for healthcare globally

For example, in the UK we have a lot of NHS customers like NHS Wirral who uses Yellowfin for their finance and administration reporting, just like organizations in many other industries. Whereas RL Datix embeds Yellowfin into their risk platform to help them track the number of incidents, like needlestick injuries, that occur in hospitals. Interestingly, the number one health risk in the UK is actually going to the hospital, so tracking those issues and putting in place remedial actions is really important. Yellowfin gives hospital administrators the ability to see a dashboard so they can understand what incidents have happened and what the implications of them are. 

In Australia, Health Metrics specializes in hospital performance management so they need specific data around the utilization rates of beds, how long people are in hospital and staffing rates. While the Children’s Cancer Institute uses Yellowfin to help track their funding requirements. 

We also have several health care customers in the US, including hc1 who does a lot of work around tracking the opioid epidemic. They then use this data to help local governments track and manage that process.

Spreadsheets prove costly, complex and risky

Before they used Yellowfin, many of these companies either built their own systems or were using spreadsheets to manage their analytical needs. The cost, complexity and risks associated with this meant they had to look for a new way to get data and we do everything we can to help them.

In healthcare, many organizations are often large and complex and have people who have learned how to save lives not read data. So it’s important to design BI products that are as simple as possible for people to understand what's going on and how they can react to it. Our web-based dashboards also mean they can also roll out BI to a much larger audience than they could with other vendors. Many of our customers tell us that Yellowfin is easy for them to use. The reason for that is because it’s been designed for business users at a price point that is more cost-effective. 

The healthcare industry's analytics needs

Because we work with so many health care organizations globally, our sales competency has also grown over time. This means we understand the health environment and what our customers are trying to achieve so we can help them get there faster. In some cases, we’ve even created products specifically for organizations. 

For example, there are specific functionalities that the health industry requires to analyze data, like statistical process control (SPC) charts that enable them to visualise certain types of data. This type of functionality doesn’t usually come straight out of the box, but we’ve worked with the NHS in the UK so that it does for them. Because their people are familiar with these charts and understand what they do, it makes it easy for a much larger audience in the organization to make decisions quickly using Yellowfin, rather than having to rely on a chosen few analysts.

In the healthcare space, there are so many ways that people can use analytics to help them understand their business better and drive organizational performance. Yellowfin supports so many of these different use cases and that’s why we’re the BI provider of choice for so many organizations in the industry.