Applied Expertise
Challenge
A major healthcare organization relied heavily on manual reference materials, including Excel, PDFs, and legacy applications, resulting in fragmented and inconsistent data. Limited automation led to error-prone updates, hard-coded report logic, and more than 2,700 duplicate or redundant reports. These legacy approaches produced inaccurate, non-standardized measures that slowed decision-making and made it difficult to maintain historical continuity during the transition to new enterprise applications, including the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system.
Solution
SEI designed and delivered a modern data foundation to standardize reporting, improve reliability, and enable self-service analytics across the organization. The solution included:
- Building a highly curated enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in Snowflake, integrating patient financials, operational finance, procurement, and spend
- Automating enterprise-wide categorizations and hierarchies to eliminate manual updates and standardize data across systems
- Applying AI and cognitive services to unlock unstructured data from invoices and contracts, while preserving continuity during enterprise system migrations
- Developing intelligent, automated integrations to support enterprise-wide data ingestion
- Delivering a self-service Tableau platform with embedded metrics, strong data quality controls, and training resources to support adoption
Results
The new data ecosystem enabled business users to leverage information reliably and with confidence. Through this work with our team, the organization:
- Standardized metrics and KPIs within the semantic layer, reducing redundancy and inconsistent definitions
- Helped business users build analytics and reports in hours instead of months, without technical support
- Improved data accuracy and completeness compared to legacy reporting assets
- Enhanced user adoption and collaboration through education, training, and a simplified self-service experience — demonstrated by a finance leader with no prior Tableau experience building a complete P&L report in under an hour
