How Snowflake Unlocks the Full Potential of Power BI in Healthcare Operations

Key Takeaways:

• Legacy systems in healthcare hinder efficient data management and decision-making.

• Power BI, enhanced by BlueCloud's expertise, provides real-time insights, better resource management, and improved patient care.

• To fully unlock Power BI's potential, BlueCloud integrates it with Snowflake’s modern data infrastructure, ensuring scalability and performance.

• This powerful integration, backed by BlueCloud and Snowflake, delivers cost-effective solutions that enhance patient outcomes.

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73% of healthcare provider organizations rely on legacy information systems according to HIMSS survey. However, these outdated platforms are becoming harder to maintain, secure, and integrate with newer technologies.  

To make things worse, healthcare professionals handle massive amounts of patient data daily—thousands of records, test results, and treatment plans flowing through hospitals and medical facilities. Managing all this information efficiently is crucial, but it often creates challenges that affect patient care, staff productivity, and overall hospital performance.  

This is where Power BI comes in.

Power BI transforms healthcare by enabling providers to organize, analyze, and interpret data with precision, driving better decisions, improved patient outcomes, and streamlined operations.  

However, to unlock its full potential, organizations must move beyond outdated legacy systems and embrace a modern, integrated data architecture.

With tightening regulatory requirements, growing cybersecurity threats, and increasing financial pressures, staying with the status quo is no longer a viable option.

In this post, we’ll explore the role of Power BI in healthcare, highlight the challenges it solves and the benefits it brings. We’ll also discuss how combining Power BI with Snowflake Data Cloud unlocks opportunities for healthcare organizations to extract valuable insights and take action.

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Why Are Legacy Platforms Holding Healthcare Operations Back?

Legacy systems are costly, risky, and hard to replace. Downtime costs millions, and patching outdated tech only delays the inevitable.

Here’s a look at some of these key issues:

The Challenge Our Client Faced

A healthcare organization was struggling with an outdated data reporting system. Their pharmacy partners needed deeper, more advanced insights to effectively track drug sales and enhance their service offerings.

The goal?  

Identify cost-saving opportunities across operations, especially by analyzing high-cost drugs with low value and exploring substitutions.  

The Challenge

While they had a solid data infrastructure in place, specifically with SQL Server, their Power BI reports were slow, disorganized, and ineffective, preventing them making timely, data-driven decisions.

Additionally, their legacy systems were bogged down by disparate data sources, including Excel, on-premises SQL servers, and even Microsoft Access. These siloed data systems made it challenging for the client to extract actionable insights and efficiently manage their healthcare operations.  

“Previously, a single person was tasked with consolidating and building SQL Server stored procedures to manage this data, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Report generation involved manually entering data into Excel, performing calculations, and formatting reports,” explains Marvin Xu, Senior Analytics Specialist at BlueCloud.

These challenges can create chaos in healthcare operations, leading to slower care, higher costs, and inefficiencies.  

Power BI solves these issues by providing a unified, data-driven approach that streamlines decision-making and improves overall operational performance.

How Power BI Improves Healthcare Operations

Power BI brings a range of benefits to healthcare organizations by turning data into actionable insights that improve both patient care and operational efficiency. Here's how:

How We Helped Our Client Revamp Power BI for Faster, Smarter Reporting

The client needed to modernize their reporting process and make data more actionable across the organization. Previously, employees spent significant time manually entering data into Excel, calculating differences, and formatting reports—delaying insights and limiting efficiency.

They partnered with BlueCloud to revamp their Power BI environment and, over time, transition their data infrastructure to a more scalable solution.  

Rather than overhauling the entire data structure, we worked within the existing infrastructure to optimize the way the reports were created and displayed. By leveraging Power BI and consolidating all data sources into Azure Data Factory and Azure SQL Server, we created a unified data pipeline for seamless integration and analysis.

By bringing all data into a cohesive structure, we helped the users easily access the data and use it to generate reports more quickly, improving data consolidation, and decision-making.

This solution improved the Power BI dashboard's functionality, making it more user-friendly, modern, and efficient. We streamlined the dashboard, saving time and effort in report generation. The reports are now faster, more efficient, and ultimately more insightful.

Result? Modernized healthcare operations.‍

The updated Power BI dashboards not only allowed for easier navigation but also enabled users to embed dashboards directly into PowerPoint presentations and export them as PDFs, saving considerable time and reducing manual reporting efforts.

Xu explains: “We helped the client transform outdated data systems into modern, intuitive platforms to enable better decision-making and data storytelling, more valuable insights and a better user experience.”

This phase laid the groundwork for future improvements, by providing better business metrics that would enable the pharmacy clients to make more informed decisions.

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Providing Best Value for the Patients: Unlocking Cost-Saving Opportunities with Smart power BI Dashboards  

One of the major benefits of this solution is the ability to identify cost-saving opportunities more effectively by analyzing drug utilization data and comparing costs across different drug categories.

The new dashboards provide insights into patient utilization trends, allowing the client to spot inefficiencies and identify high-cost, low-value drugs that could be substituted with more cost-effective alternatives.  

Xu adds: “This functionality allows the client’s team to pinpoint areas where they can optimize their pharmaceutical offerings, ensuring they are providing the best value to their patients while controlling costs.”

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The Impact: Empowering Pharmacies to Make Informed, Profitable Decisions

The ultimate benefit of this solution lies in its ability to help healthcare organizations make more informed decisions about which drugs to stock and sell. With improved Power BI reports and more actionable insights, pharmacies can now track which drugs are selling well and adjust their inventory accordingly. This enables them to optimize their sales strategy, increase revenue, and improve profitability.

Upgrading data systems and dashboards is like moving from an old iPhone 3 to the latest iPhone 14. The improvement isn’t just cosmetic—it’s a fundamental shift in how you access and use your data, making the experience faster, more intuitive, and more effective.  

“It's about empowering clients to leverage years of historical data, just like a smart promotion can lead to increased sales, drive smarter business decisions and ultimately achieve better results,” says Xu.  

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Snowflake Migration: The Key to Unmatched Scalability and Performance

Fact: Without Snowflake as the supporting data cloud and the backbone for scalability and performance, the solution we have built can't realize its full potential.

Snowflake provides a modern, cloud-based data infrastructure that allows organizations to manage and process larger datasets more efficiently and make better use of their data moving forward. The goal is to make all business data more unified, faster, and easier to use.  

Snowflake is a “gold layer” that makes it easier for employees to work with the data, offering advantages like speed, intuitiveness, and cost-effectiveness. It involves data that has been processed and refined for decision-making, offering even more powerful analytics to the client and the client’s end-users, enabling them to scale their data infrastructure and improve decision-making across the board.

Take a Step Toward Smarter, Scalable Healthcare Data Solutions with BlueCloud and Snowflake

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BlueCloud proudly stands at the forefront of data and analytics, GenAI, and cloud transformation. As a leading Snowflake partner, we offer our clients tailored solutions using the latest cloud technologies.    

Explore our data engineering services to learn how we can help you unlock the full potential of Power BI in healthcare. Learn how Snowflake can help you get the most from your data.  

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