Tableau server is a good choice for a healthcare system willing to strengthen analytics
July 13, 2018
Tableau server is a good choice for a healthcare system willing to strengthen analytics
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
We are a healthcare system that consists of hospitals, clinics, affiliated providers, and an insurance company. We developed a dashboard and reporting environment to support business intelligence for the two major areas: business and clinical. Business reports are for leadership, management, and finance. Clinical reports are for physicians, clinical champions, clinical departments, medical directors, and clinical researchers. We wanted to automate the data extraction and report development processes with the best productivity, since they have been developed with different technologies and toolkits which caused inefficiency in maintaining analyst and computer resources.
Pros
- Since we're a healthcare organization, we're sensitive to security and privacy of information. Tableau provides delicate control of contents in terms of visibility in dashboards and has helped us effectively prevent potential information breach issues. It was easy to integrate Tableau Server with our active directory to control delicate privilege of data access depending on clinical specialty and roles.
- Since we have a variety of data sources from different systems--electronic health records, claims system, patient administrative system, radiology imaging system, etc.--harmonizing those sources and building and managing robust data connections in one environment is critical. Tableau is very good at that.
- Tableau provides great monitoring tools to manage bandwidth and performance, cleaning up unused data with extract and report.
Cons
- Tableau Server's computational efficiency of managing metadata is good, but it provides very minimum functions from the standpoint of server managers. As we add more data sources such as big data and external systems outside our organization, its importance becomes bigger.
- The new alert function on Tableau dashboard is promising, but it is only provided at a server level, not at a desktop level. In addition, it only provides minimum alerting reconfigurability. I understand it is a new function as proof of concept and look forward to seeing it advance.
- Tableau Server is good at monitoring usage of existing reports but provides little about monitoring data extracts and their data pipelining status.
- A new feature of integration with AWS is exciting but need to keep watching how it works well.
- IBM Cognos and D3.js
We used and still are using IBM Cognos for business intelligence purposes. It is good for use as a data infrastructure and analytic framework, rather than a BI toolkit, but Tableau is replacing Cognos fast. We used D3.js for a few proofs of concept visualization and dashboarding, but those efforts stopped because of productivity and maintenance problems.
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