Case Study: Southwest Behavioral & Health Services
Custom Dashboards Provide Up-to-the-Minute Insights
Southwest Behavioral & Health Services (SBH), one of Arizona’s largest behavioral health care providers, was struggling to get fast, accurate, and up-to-date insights into operations and revenue out of outdated data storage and legacy information transfer practices. With the help of Reimagined, SBH now has a cloud-based data warehouse and executive dashboards that improved:
Consistency and timeliness of data
Accuracy in reporting
Efficiency of operations.
Opportunity
A Need for Actionable, Current Data
Based in Phoenix and encompassing five counties in Arizona, SBH was created in 1969 as a federally funded program and gained nonprofit status in 1974. Several mergers and acquisitions from 1995-2011 has made SBH one of the largest comprehensive mental health and substance abuse treatment services providers in Arizona. Currently SBH employs just over 1000 people and serves 16,000 patients with an array of programs including outpatient mental health treatment and psychiatric services, addiction treatment, intensive inpatient care, and residential housing.
SBH’s on-premise data warehouse, built several decades ago, was becoming antiquated and vulnerable. Transferring data from the electronic health records (EHR) system to the data warehouse was so slow and laborious that operations managers and organization executives at SBH could only receive organizational information about revenue and operations in Excel reports that came monthly. This meant that organization leaders were constantly working in a cumbersome system with view-only, outdated data. As senior accountant Teresa Saunders recounts, “Everything was manual, everything was linked, and everything went into Excel. I had maybe seven files where every file was built on each other and linked together. So you can imagine that if one thing was wrong in the files, everything went haywire.”
The lag time required for transferring data from the EHR to the data warehouse meant that tables constantly broke, creating inconsistencies between reports. The time it took decision-makers to troubleshoot and repair data impinged on their ability to do higher-order work like researching claims and denials and reviewing revenue.
Solution
A Cloud-Based Data Warehouse and Executive Dashboards
Improving data accuracy, speed, and accessibility across the organization first required that SBH’s on-premise data warehouse be converted to a cloud-based system. The team at Reimagined worked with SBH to lift the data into the cloud, using Databricks on Microsoft’s Azure Platform.
Once the data warehouse was in the cloud, Reimagined worked with SBH executives to create a series of Power BI dashboards to improve views of patient encounters, claims, revenue, and expenses across SBH facilities and programs.
Results
Improved Data Speed, Visibility, and Consistency
Moving from an on-premise to a cloud-based data warehouse improved data security and eliminated the need for hardware, licensing, backups, and patching.
“It’s just a better, more efficient and more cost-effective way to manage your resources,” said Bob Sanowski, the SBH vice-president of information technology.
The custom executive dashboards developed by the Reimagined team showcase more consistent and timely insights. They provide more tools and functionality than the static monthly Excel reports, allowing SBH leaders to drill down into the data for their own purposes.
“The dashboards give them a lot more from a leadership standpoint, information at their fingertips on a daily basis. Whether it's questions about if claims are being paid, or if they're getting paid quickly enough, or something else, this is actionable data, not something people just look at," said Sanowski.