From a statistical perspective, Americans have spent more than $2.7 trillion on healthcare, with the growth rate in the industry exceeding 100% in the last decade. McKesson, the nation’s oldest and largest healthcare services company, is trying to help providers, patients, and the insurance companies better manage their businesses and reduce the cost curve; the company wants to provide better care and quality of life for its patients.
Improving From the Inside
Patients often don’t see the many moving parts of running a hospital, all necessary in ensuring that patients get the best care possible. McKesson’s customers are typically in the healthcare provider markets, which includes hospitals, physicians, insurance companies, and the entire continuum of the market. McKesson, as a company, serves an even greater part of the market as the largest pharmaceutical distributor in America. It also has an extremely large IT component in terms of selling software and solutions to the provider market and the payer market.
McKesson’s enterprise intelligence suite is intended to provide both retrospective concurrent and predictive modeling types of solutions for an enterprise so they can better manage the clinical effectiveness, financial performance, and operational efficiency of their organization. There are many components to this, but McKesson considers TIBCO Spotfire as a key factor to that overall strategy in terms of how they convey information to end users. It’s important McKesson that it doesn’t provide more burdens to the end users in terms of the information that is displayed and the way it is displayed.
Keep It Simple
McKesson needed ways of providing information in the most simplistic way, while providing the most information possible. The company wants to be able to empower its employees to do what they need to do, while making sure not to clutter their lives with irrelevant graphs, gauges, and irrelevant information. Spotfire is a tremendous asset to accomplishing those goals — it allows McKesson to work on the predictive end without being hindered by the data. McKesson can now understand its business in ways unlike ever before.
The enterprise nature of Spotfire’s approach of not having to be purely an in-memory platform offers the ability to use both a disc-based and in-memory approach — it allows an organization to scale to a much larger size. Other solutions didn’t seem to fit the bill as well as Spotfire did for McKesson. Also, Spotfire’s commitment to predictive modeling, which is a very forward-thinking concept in healthcare, was one of the great opportunities that the TIBCO solution has brought for the company.
