What Can You Do with Analytics?

Analytics, formerly AdvancedInsight, is a powerful data visualization tool that can be licensed with AdvancedMD. It is AdvancedMD's report builder and it does a pretty good job. 

Many clients under-utilize Analytics, perhaps because it requires a little bit of know-how to use. However, by comparison to many other report-building tools, it is fairly simple to use. It is based on IBM Cognos and in our experience it is as complex (or simple) as Tableau. 

So what can you do with it? 

It offers two main modes - the tabular mode and the dashboard mode. 

The Tabular Mode

The tabular mode allows you to create pivot tables using AdvancedMD's PM data as the data source. It is simple to use once to understand the data structure. Think about creating tables such as visit numbers by appointment type by service data by patient insurance, etc. In addition, all the billing data is available as well - payments, charges, adjustments, denial codes, etc. The time dimension allows you to use service data, billing data, entry date, and appointment date, thus allowing you to view data as matched (associated) or unmatched (unassociated). 

Advanced users can create new metrics and data structures (say, grouping CPT codes by category, or defining a payment per unit metric). This too is not very hard. 

The Dashboard Mode

The dashboard mode provides access to the same data sets and allows you as well to create new data structures and new metrics. It then allows you to create a wide variety of charts based on the data. We've used it mostly for daily and weekly volume reporting and weekly and monthly revenue cycle performance tracking. 

As far as data visualization tools go, this is one of the simpler ones we've used (see images below). 

Any Drawbacks? 

The one main drawback is that these reports cannot be governed by user-level security. Meaning, that if you want an employee to view a personalized dashboard, there is nothing to stop them from viewing everybody else's data. So these reports should be viewed as management reports, not as personalized employee scorecards.  

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