Competition

COMPETITOR 1:

Name: Internal reporting teams

Description: There are a few reporting entities within our company that report out of our databases but who are not in our own chain of command. These entities will seek out specific ‘wins’ in order to represent value they bring. The resulting dashboards are often pretty however the complexity of the data gathered is often handled by our team first. This has created an internal conflict between our team and other internal reporting teams as data becomes managed in part by politics rather than driven by need and managed by the correct talent for the situation. 

Similarities: Because we are all reporting teams we all take direct requests from our end users. Because of the amount of data we have available we are often working in the same data sets and pulling the same data for different applications.

Differences: Unlike other reporting teams within the organization, our team has been specifically trained to use the data model around our EMR. This leads to poor coding practices out of the other teams as they don’t have the requisite knowledge to report on the data properly. This often leads to our team building out part of the solutions that other teams use – and in the times we aren’t involved – we have found the other teams making mistakes in how they use data.

COMPETITOR 2:

Name: Epic EMR

Description:  Most of the data we report on comes from our EMR, Epic. Epic is considered a best of breed in their EMR and are often leading the industry in technological innovation with their solution. Because these solutions are so expensive to maintain, we are often following Epic’s lead when deploying new features, applications, and even hardware decisions.

Similarities: Both of our organizations spend a considerable amount of time developing reports and tools to make data readily available to end-users. 

Differences:  Because Epic is a vendor, they often code their solutions to accommodate the industry as a whole rather than our individual system as a practice.  Their solutions are one-sided and must often be adapted to our system by our own internal configuration specialists. Unlike Epic, we can code specific solutions for our organization and even bring in data from other vendors in order to create a data tapestry that can represent our system as a whole rather than as myriad of vendors. 

COMPETITOR 3:

Name: Outside reporting/consultation vendors

Description: Because our health system is so large and our reporting needs so great, leadership will often look to outside vendors to help augment our reporting shortfalls. 

Similarities: We both provide real world solutions for data.

Differences: Vendors often bring in reporting tools they’ve developed to showcase their best features. This along with our backlog of report requests often puts us at a disadvantage and results in the company spending money on outside reporting solutions. These solutions can be painful to configure and our often sensitive to internal changes (either at the health system or with related vendors who generate the data). Unlike these competitors though, we can develop custom internal solutions at a fraction of the cost and design our maintenance plans around them to minimize disruption. In other words we can build our tools to tailor to our organization whereas outside vendors tailor their existing tools to fit within our solution. Because of this approach there is often a lack of flexibility to 3rd party solutions.