Healthcare organizations today face the challenge of transforming vast amounts of data into actionable insights that foster patient engagement and support better outcomes. At Kyruus Health, we understand the critical role that data plays in driving informed decisions and enhancing consumer experiences. Our journey to developing impactful analytics has evolved significantly, leading us to introduce Advanced Analytics—a tool designed for organizations ready to take their data interpretation to the next level.
Our foundational analytics offering, Core Analytics, laid the groundwork for delivering key insights, but we recognized that organizations need more control and flexibility to delve deeper into their data and shape it to answer specific, evolving business questions.
Advanced Analytics: Tailored, Powerful, and In-Depth
Advanced Analytics provides our clients with full autonomy over their data exploration, equipping organizations to:
- Create Custom Reports: Tailor dashboard and reports to address unique business needs, choosing metrics and visualizations that align with their strategic goals.
- Integrate External Data: Build a comprehensive 360° view of consumer behavior by incorporating external data sources for deeper insights.
- Export and Share Data: Send reports directly to stakeholders, integrate data with internal business intelligence tools, and export datasets for offline analysis.
- Adapt Reports to Different Audiences: Design and save variations of reports for different teams—from detailed analyst-focused data tables to high-level executive summaries.
These capabilities allow our clients to pivot quickly, respond to new questions, and gain a clearer understanding of member and patient behavior without waiting for pre-scheduled reports. While our foundational reporting remains a valuable option for many organizations, Advanced Analytics meets the needs of those looking to drive proactive, insight-led decision-making.
Six Guiding Principles for Impactful Analytics
This shift from limitations to possibilities brought new challenges. Feeling the weight of these possibilities, we moved past option paralysis by discussing many open-ended questions, such as:
What should reports look like?
Which metrics should they cover?
Which visualizations should be used to communicate those metrics?
How should raw data be processed to make insights easier to consume?
How frequently should we deliver reports?
Our north star during these conversations was impact—ensuring that whatever choices we made, the intent behind them would be making our reports more impactful to their consumers.
As we develop new analytics tools, we keep in mind six guiding principles that summarize past learnings and help us deliver impactful reporting. For organizations embarking on developing their own reporting, we share these principles with you.
1. Tell a story
Start constructing your report with the story you want to tell in mind. Once the story is identified you can begin to discuss the metrics and visualizations that best tell the story.
The activity of outlining, discussing and iterating on the narrative before beginning report development not only elevates the quality of the final report, but it can save valuable time. Including stakeholders and eventual end-users at this step of the process is definitely encouraged.
For additional resources here, many of our analysts have read Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s storytelling with data multiple times, and highly recommend it!
2. Target a specific audience
Those who consume your reporting will vary in technical expertise and familiarity with the data you are presenting, so keep your target audience in mind and tailor the story to them. It could be that you develop multiple reports that speak to the same topic, differing only in the targeted audience.
There are many strategies for how to develop reporting depending on the intended audience, including which visuals to use, how many colors to use, and report length, to name a few. There is an entire chapter devoted to the audience in Knaflic’s bestseller, mentioned previously (see chapter 4). However, the mere practice of identifying and being mindful of your audience during development goes a long way.
3. Follow a well-designed, consistent layout
Once you’ve outlined your story, identified your audience, and have selected metrics and visuals that best complement that story, it’s time to design a simple, attractive layout that is consistent throughout the report. Once established, use this layout for all of your reports. Doing so will help your consumers see how reports fit into the bigger picture and will make new reports feel familiar.
4. Provide context
We’ve found that unless you are in the weeds with data day-in and day-out, it is easy to forget how metrics should be interpreted or what they really say (wait, what does the bounce rate mean, again?). Help your consumers by including a glossary and definitions at the end of the report and spell out how to read each page (and, in some cases, what the take home is) on the page itself.
5. Include comparisons
The latest data is more valuable when viewed through the lens of recent history. For all the metrics in our reports we provide historical trend lines and/or quick comparisons to recent history to assess if metrics are increasing or decreasing.
One question we’re frequently asked is along these lines: This metric is interesting…are you seeing the same for your other clients? This is an important question, since such a comparison is helpful in distinguishing signal from noise in recent trends. As a result, we provide a peer group benchmark that is hand-selected to provide a meaningful comparison for the metric on display.
6. Be automated
Regardless of the power of a report, without automation it will become a chore (potentially someone’s full-time job) to maintain. We design all analytics offerings with automation in mind.
Our aspiration for automation does introduce some limitations. For example, the context we’d like to provide isn’t always able to be automated, so we have to say something else. However, the time saved with automation empowers our analysts to tackle important tasks and initiatives that can’t be automated, such as research, developing statistical models and ad-hoc reporting.
Looking Ahead: Data Empowerment for All Organizations
Advanced Analytics represents a significant step forward in our commitment to empowering our clients. With greater control over data, these healthcare organizations can create tailored reports, explore detailed member and patient behavior, and make informed decisions that drive patient experience and improve health outcomes.
While Core Analytics continues to offer reliable, structured insights, we’re excited to provide organizations with a solution that brings data to life in new ways. By combining customizable analytics with our six guiding principles, we’re equipping organizations to turn data into action and maintain a leading edge in patient engagement strategies.
Healthcare organizations seeking to harness the full potential of their data can now do so with tools that match their ambition. Explore Advanced Analytics to see how you can gain deeper insights and drive meaningful impact for your organization.
