Connecting with your Audience on their Terms with Alteryx

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

Ryan Richardson

Role:

AVP, Strategic Analytics

Company:

HCA Healthcare

Overview of Use Case

HCA Healthcare is a for-profit operator of healthcare organizations with 185 hospitals across 19 states and 30 million patient encounters per year. Given their size and scale, they have several platforms and systems that generate large amounts of data. Organizing that information to provide targeted analytics to each of their internal audiences posed a daunting challenge. Alteryx was crucial in linking HCA’s various data sources while simultaneously providing distinct users with the reporting format they were used to.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

I support the operational and financial teams in our Strategic Analytics group. Our team manages data from several platforms and systems such as Teradata, Oracle, Salesforce, Qlik, and Tableau, just to name a few. We have just about every platform under the sun in some form or fashion. Within HCA, we have three groups of internal audiences who are consuming analytics: Senior Management, Functional Managers, and Analytics Support. Our challenge was finding a solution to input and automate content delivery to each of these audiences while still providing valuable reporting insights. The answer, unsurprisingly, was Alteryx.

Describe your working solution

Our Strategic Analytics team used Alteryx to combine various data sources and tailor reporting delivery for internal audiences at HCA. We serve 17 markets and millions of patients, so we have tons of data to make sense of. Our workflow allows us to input and scrub the data prior to passing through to a reporting tool, while also creating meaningful metrics used by internal audiences to make decisions. Once in the correct format and with the key data points, we put ourselves in the mindset of a Senior Manager or VP to understand what insights they would want to see. Our goal is to serve up content that answers the most common business questions to make a downstream impact.

Senior Management consists of senior VPs (or above) who have a very wide scope and tend to stay high level. Typically, these are people with 25 to 35 years of experience at HCA. They leverage legacy reporting and like the same views they've seen since the mid to late 1980s. For them, we generate an automated PDF one-pager which includes content based on overall market performance and high-level service line summaries.

In the middle tier, we have our “Functional Managers,” who tend to be VP-level executives responsible for one line of business within the company. Teams will wake up in the morning only thinking about how to excel at cardiovascular or pediatric services from a clinical or volume growth perspective. Generally, this group prefers to drill into a Tableau dashboard based on pre-defined service line performance to find meaningful insights.

Thirdly, we have Analytics Support. That consists of teams, like mine, throughout the organization who are interacting with VPs and Senior Management. We're deep into the details and want to preserve every single row or column in the data set to answer any question we may receive. Our preferred format is a raw Tableau Hyper file with all data elements preserved.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

The beauty of Alteryx and the reason we love it to death, is we're able to effortlessly automate content delivery for our 3 types of audiences, in the format they are familiar with. Not everyone is a clicker and not everyone is going to drill in the same way. With Alteryx, our team enables the critical audiences with analytics, tailored to their needs. Whether it’s a PDF or visualization, we provide them with the resources they need to positively impact the organization and our patients. Alteryx has been a godsend for HCA!

Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here.