The term “business intelligence” gets thrown around a lot but the concept can seem daunting for administrators who are less focused on data. If you are interested in incorporating business intelligence into your management process, you may be trying to figure out what exactly it means for you.
“I think business intelligence is everything you don’t like about the canned reports you are getting out of your practice management system,” says Nate Moore, CPA, MBA, FACMPE, MGMA member, president, Moore Solutions Inc., Centerville, Utah. “It’s customized; it’s focused on exactly what matters to your practice.”
Moore emphasizes that every practice that he works with uses business intelligence in their own way, depending on their priorities. “What is life-threateningly important to one practice, another doesn’t care about,” he explains.
According to Moore, isolating certain metrics important to your practice can help you understand where you can improve and what factors are helping – or hindering – your revenue. But he also recommends that administrators be careful not to go overboard. “You can use data to the exclusion of common sense if you drive too much with data,” he says. To counteract that tendency, Moore recommends focusing on the reality of what the data says and how the culture works with it.
If you are new to business intelligence, Moore recommends starting small. “Just get one set of data that really matters to your practice,” he says.
Listen to our full conversation and learn how you can incorporate business intelligence into your practice in this episode of our podcast, MGMA Small Talk.
If you’d like to hear more episodes of MGMA Small Talk, visit our Podcasts page, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or SoundCloud so that you’ll never miss an episode.
