Purchasing a new vehicle can be an overwhelming process. Do you want a car, truck, SUV or maybe a crossover? Which is best for you? Which brand is best? Which model, which trim package? So many choices! When you purchase a motor vehicle, you are putting a lot of money into the product, so you want to be sure that you are getting the vehicle you need and at a good price. There are a lot of similarities between purchasing a vehicle and ordering and receiving and using a consumable health care data product. There are many options and how can you be sure the product you are requesting is going to be the thing you need?
Product differentiation
Product differentiation is a marketing strategy used to encourage a consumer to pick one product over another. Often vehicle manufactures will create different versions of a vehicle but with enough differentiation to fill multiple needs, take SUV’s for example. As I write this article, Toyota is selling multiple SUV’s ranging from RAV-4’s to ‘Highlanders’ to ‘Sequoia’. Additionally, manufactures like Toyota offer certain features that can only be paired with certain vehicles.
Epic has similar versions of its databases and reporting tools.
Epic has different “models” for their data databases. There’s Chronicles, the transactional database that interacts directly with the EMR and has up to the minute data. Then there is the new and more streamlined database, Caboodle which contains a lot of what Chronicles has, but is more refined and modern. Then there is a the big one, Clarity…Epics largest database.
Additionally, just like buying a vehicle, there are some items that must be used with certain models. For example, Epic’s “Reporting Workbench” is an internal reporting tool that connects chronicles and can provide up to the minute data.
Another “combination” is the use of Epics other internal tool, Slicer Dicer.
Slicer Dicer is Epic’s drag and drop self service reporting tool that is pretty good. It connects to Caboodle and can provide a user with some really good analytics. Finally, there is Clarity…the cool thing about Clarity it that you can connect a lot of tools to this database, Crystal, SSRS, Power BI and Tableau to name a few.
Making the right decision, whether purchasing a new vehicle or creating your consumable data product requires some thinking and of course an evaluation of the value.
Determining Value
Value is subjective, and each of us puts different weight on different things, but a very basis way to determine value is comparing the utility of the product against its cost. In the consumable data product world, we might not be too concerned with the actual monetary cost, so lets consider cost in a general sense. What do you have to give up in order to achieve a certain utility.
Let’s say you need up to the minute data. You are going to need to use the Reporting Workbench tool against the Chronicles database. You will have access to “right now” data, but not a lot of it. You will have today’s patients within one “domain”. In this context a “domain” is the subject area, like medications or imaging. The “cost” here is a very limited subset of data.
Perhaps you are keen on self-service, you want to be able to ask and answer your own questions. Slicer Dicer might be a great choice for you. You will be empowered to investigate and dig deep into one or two domains and add more fields than in Reporting Workbench and you will be using Caboodle. Caboodle is not designed to give you ‘everything’, it is designed to give you a lot of things, but not everything. Slicer Dicer, in my opinion is a great “first pass” reporting tool. Slicer Dicer is also limited on how far back you can query. This combination is great if you have some basic questions and you don’t need a lot of historical data.
If Reporting Workbench is a RAV4….and Slicer Dicer is a Highlander…Clarity is the Sequoia! Large enough to fit 8 people, haul a camper, take on a date night, pull you out of a ditch type of vehicle!
Clarity can do just about anything, but it comes at a cost. It has hundreds of tables, thousands of fields…it has every bit of EMR data your organization has generated since you went live on Epic. There are so many options within Clarity that sometimes a simple requests take longer to understand because of all the different variables. One of the greatest things about Clarity, however, is we can create products using several tools…maybe Power BI, or export to an Excel file…or extract data to send to a vendor, the utility of Clarity is unmatched but many people are concerned with the cost. Often, people misunderstand the process of creating a healthcare data product so the ‘cost’ goes up. For example, we often have to re-work, or rebuild products because along the way people change their mind, or have different expectations. Just like purchasing a vehicle, it is important to define your wants and needs…and to be able to identify the difference.
The car salesperson may have acquired a bad reputation over the years, but most reputable dealers spend a lot of time and energy making sure those sales folks are highly training and educated in the products they sell. Many dealerships let their sales team drive different models around for a few weeks so they can really learn about the product they are selling. As healthcare data product creators, we have the experience and knowledge to convert your product needs and wants into a valuable product that gets you to where you want to be.
Listen…at the end of day, its your money…if you NEED the Tundra, but insist on the RAV4, well…the sales person still gets the commission…and you get what you wanted.