Evolucare Analytics – Analyze the past, anticipate the future

Interview with Didier Godard, IT Director of Fondation COS Alexandre Glasberg

Fondation COS Alexandre Glasberg manages over 60 institutions and services in France that house elderly people (20 nursing homes), people with disabilities, asylum seekers and people living in poverty. With almost 2,800 employees and 1,730 volunteers, it welcomes about 15,000 people per year.
The foundation has introduced IT solutions from Evolucare (Medsphere, Osiris, Oxalys, Osipharm) in 25 of its institutions in the health and social care sectors. By adding Evolucare Analytics, the Business Intelligence add-on module, it is adding value to the stores of data collected by various applications and is able to provide decision support tools to all fields. Didier Godard, IT Director of the foundation since October 2014, describes the project and the main features made possible by this development.

What is your vision for Business Intelligence in healthcare?

The healthcare sector has many types of applications that work well. We gather a great deal of information from these programs. But little is being done by way of data extraction. Professionals now expect to be offered data retrieval and analysis. The applications aren’t natively designed for this. That’s why it’s important to develop BI tools that can be used not only to produce dashboards and indicators, but that also help cross-reference data.

What led you to choose the Evolucare Analytics solution?

Previously, we purchased the BusinessObjects solution, but buying licenses from this publisher became too expensive. Meanwhile, Evolucare decided to develop decision support tools that use the BI features from SQL Server. Provided that it offered the same features we had in the past, I was obviously very interested when this new add-on module was announced. We started by working on the dashboards for the medical world; we are now tackling the administrative and financial section.

What main needs does the decision support platform address?

It makes it possible to improve the coding quality for procedures and save time. Thanks to the dashboards developed for DMA(1), the doctors from the DIM (département de l’information médicale – medical information department) know exactly which files contain inaccuracies and can immediately correct them. This has a positive impact on the institution’s finances.

The decision support tool is also used to respond to external requests, such as the yearly compendium of IQSS(2) indicators, run by the Quality department, and CAQES(3) , run by the pharmacists.

We are also currently introducing performance dashboards for the social care sector, otherwise known as “ANAP (4) indicators” (Agence Nationale d’Appui à la Performance – French performance support agency). They require collecting information from the entire information system, ranging from administrative management to human resources and medical records.

Is Evolucare Analytics for BI experts only?

We should distinguish two ways of using Evolucare Analytics. In a “push-button” configuration, a dashboard is simply made available to a user who just has to select a few criteria to extract data (dates, medical unit, etc.).
The expert users, however, such as DIMs and medical information technicians (TIM – techniciens de l’information médicale), have to first learn to use the applications where requests are made and understand the available information in order to use them sensibly.

What are the development prospects?

So far, we have primarily analyzed the past. From now on, we would like to look to the future. We count on the roadmap of evolutions that Evolucare shared with us for the next five years. On our side, we are currently reflecting on future challenges.
In addition, we are already partnering with Dr. Arnal, DIM doctor, to participate in developing the tool: we are describing our specific needs and the Evolucare BI team is being responsive and efficient by regularly making new dashboards available.

[1] Dotation modulée à l’activité- Allocation modulated according to activity , introduced in 2017 following the financing reform of rehab facilities

[2] Indicateurs de qualité et de sécurité des soins – Healthcare quality and safety indicators

[3] Contrat d’amélioration de la qualité et de l’efficience des soins – Healthcare quality and efficiency improvement agreement

[4] Their goals are to contribute to the management dialogue, assist internal operations of facilities, improve knowledge of products and enable facilities to benchmark themselves.