A Data and BI Strategy Moves a Medicaid Agency Closer to a Modern Data Experience

CHALLENGE

A state’s Medicaid Agency hadn’t gauged their enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and BI experience for a few years, so they had no real measure of success. Nor did they have a method to understand if they were accomplishing their goal of delivering information to all their respective consumers.

With many moving parts and layers of complexity, they wanted to build a data- and insights driven-culture and modernize the Medicaid data experience to make it more efficient.

That would mean removing barriers to data access so users could easily access data in their EDW and build reports that provide the business intelligence needed for decision making.

What they needed was a holistic strategy so they could focus on initiatives that furthered their progress toward a goal state, rather than working on one-off projects that didn’t fit the overall vision for the data environment or their overall strategy.

We rolled up our sleeves and partnered with our client’s various stakeholders to get the job done.

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solution: Deliver Decision Intelligence through an Integrated BI Experience

In a nutshell, we helped our client develop an actionable data and BI strategy to reach all these goals. We accomplished this by assessing the Medicaid Agency’s current state, defining the capabilities they were looking to deliver, and reviewing their needs and gaps.

With that, we could develop a strong data strategy that focused on driving public health and operational outcomes, which included technical and process improvements.

Our work could be broken down into a combination of assessments, analysis, and recommendations. The assessments we performed were as follows.

Then we conducted an analysis of the mandated managed care entity (MCE) reporting process, where we supplied several recommendations in automation that would reduce the need for the massive amount of manual data manipulation.  

All of these assessments produced data from which we could derive insights to develop overall recommendations.

Using the data, we were able to perform a gap analysis of the maturity and data experience at the agency. That allowed us to identify the priority areas of improvement that would impact the organization the most.

Building on this body of work, we designed a strategic framework to capture the essence of how the agency approaches data, which included identifying the strategic pillars: data as an asset, data quality, and infrastructure and tools.

We then formalized all aspects of the framework into the agency’s first data strategy. That activity continues to serve as a foundation for all activities of the client’s data and analytics team.

To provide another degree of depth, here are the critical skillsets we brought to the table in this initiative:

• Data governance
• Project management
• Business analysis
• Process analysis
• Process engineering and improvement
• Data analysis
• Data strategy
• Master data management
• Business intelligence development
• Data integration
• Organizational change management

RESULTS

The client’s new data and BI strategy helped improve the overall use, experience, effectiveness, and adoption of analytics and EDW data throughout the state Medicaid agency.

The outcomes of this initiative were all focused on developing a foundation that could be built upon with future efforts.

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