MedAssets is a consultancy that partners with hospitals, clinics and other healthcare providers to help them achieve financial savings, particularly in areas of supply cost and service delivery. The company accomplishes these savings by gathering product lists and pricing information from vendors, analyzing the information, negotiating the best prices on behalf of its customers, and then making recommendations to each customer about which contracts to award.
Historically, Medassets relied on individual Excel spreadsheet files stored in Microsoft SharePoint. Capturing and analyzing complexities in the RFP responses in one file, as well as aggregating data across multiple files to produce management reports, was a labor-intensive manual process. Additionally, these completed analyses are difficult to share within the company and with clients. For these reasons, MedAssets needed a way for client managers and executives to collate multiple analyses simultaneously in order to achieve summary knowledge of trends and identify process improvements.
Microsoft partner Sogeti led the MedAssets IT team in conducting a series of proof of concepts (POCs) aimed at showing what could be done with its customer pricing data, and how the self-service BI capabilities of Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 can benefit both analytics and client managers now and in the future. They created scripts to automate the process of opening Excel files off of SharePoint and pushing them into SQL Server 2014, and then we brought up all of the data for the latest calendar year using the Power BI tools in Office 365, did some minor data validation, and generated the reports. These reports aggregated the vendor sourcing data in ways that had previously been impossible for the analytics team.
To MedAssets business users, the biggest impact of the joint POC was the ability to see the sourcing analysis in ways they had previously been unable to present it to client managers. In particular, having data about how much savings MedAssets provided to each customer over the most recent calendar year is a valuable statistic when cultivating client relationships.
You can learn more about the MedAssets solution by reading the more detailed case study here.
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