Greetings and welcome to the Anodyne Health IT Blog. I’m Sean Molley, Chief Technology Officer and your guide into the world of the propeller-heads. The title of this post is drawn from one of the most frequent comments I’ve heard over the years when speaking to groups of end users and business executives who have been burned by bad implementations of Business Intelligence (BI) software. Information technology in general and BI in particular are a huge part of what we do here at Anodyne, but I think one of our biggest strengths as a company is the way in which we take IT and make it work for users in a way that is intuitive and powerful. I’m consistently thrilled by how quickly people are able to get up and running with our software and make the leap from novice to power user in such a short period of time. This is in stark contrast to what many organizations experience when they purchase and install supposedly high-powered BI software – you don’t have to look very hard to find horror stories told by people who’ve spent millions of dollars on hardware and software, spent years on planning, implementation, and customization, and then failed to derive any significant value from those massive investments. That’s exactly what we are in business to help people avoid.
At Anodyne, our approach to technology is unique, and it’s specifically designed so that our clients never have to tell those kinds of horror stories. We think that BI should be inexpensive to buy, fast to implement, and easy to use – with an immediate and tangible return on investment that keeps right on delivering measurable value each and every month. And our clients agree – as you can read in the many testimonials to be found elsewhere on this website. As the CTO, I’m supposed to tell you that this is because our nerds are smarter than everybody else’s nerds. They are, of course, but that’s not why our BI delivers results that are unmatched in the industry. We build better BI solutions because we start by focusing on real-world expertise and only then do we build software that translates that real-world expertise into code. No mere program will ever fully replace the experience and common sense of a human being, of course, but software has the power to sift through massive quantities of data at a much faster rate than any human ever could, and our challenge in healthcare IT is to figure out how we can combine the brute force of a computer’s power with the insight and intelligence of a revenue-cycle expert.
That approach is really what attracted me to Anodyne in the first place: I’ve been building software for a long time, and I’ve been building what most folks would call “business intelligence” software almost exclusively for the last 10 years, the vast majority of it for healthcare. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe what works and what doesn’t. The traditional approach to BI has always been to start by focusing on the software instead of on the problem that software is supposed to solve. The most powerful BI tool in the world is useless unless it’s been built and customized by people who have deep knowledge of the specific domain in which you need it to solve problems. I think that’s why so many organizations have been frustrated with their “enterprise” BI implementations – they bought “enterprise” software that was designed to be all things to all people, which really just means that it can do a lot of things at a mediocre level instead of doing one thing well. At Anodyne, revenue-cycle management is what we do, and we do it well. That experience and expertise is what we translate into our software. Our BI tools are better because they were designed by people who think like you do.
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on a variety of topics, from BI in general to Anodyne’s BI in particular and everything in between. Other members of our IT team will also take the floor from time to time and discuss topics that fall within their specific areas of expertise. Our hope is that this blog will both inform and entertain you – and that by the time we’re finished, you’ll agree that “business intelligence” doesn’t have to be an oxymoron after all.
Talk to you later --
Sean
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M. Sean Molley │ Chief Technology Officer, Anodyne Health