Business Intelligence Case Study: To effectively manage the emergency departments for which they're responsible, EMA physicians need access to a wide range of clinical, operational, financial, and satisfaction metrics. For example, they need to know whether their emergency department operations are functioning efficiently.

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Challenge: Meet Growing Need for Security, Capacity, and Scalability

Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) is a group of more than 250 board-certified emergency physicians who are contracted to manage and staff emergency departments at 17 hospitals in New York and New Jersey. EMA physicians treat up to 2,000 emergency patients per day, and more than 700,000 each year.

To effectively manage the emergency departments for which they're responsible, EMA physicians need access to a wide range of clinical, operational, financial, and satisfaction metrics. For example, they need to know whether their emergency department operations are functioning efficiently. They need to understand costs associated with providing patient care and their correlation to outcomes. Physicians also need access to patient satisfaction data to identify opportunities for improvement. And since much of physician compensation is directly tied to individual site metrics, it's vital that physicians understand their performance relative to various key performance indicators.

"Our physicians and managers are busy doing what they do best: taking care of patients," says Jonathan Rothman, director of data management for EMA. "They need information that's easy to access and understand without requiring end-users to be tech-savvy. My team's objective is to create analytics and information displays that help end-users identify relationships between groups of data, and to enable physicians to make sense of - and make decisions based on - the displayed results."