Belitsoft > Business Intelligence Software Development

Business Intelligence Software Development

From Data to Insights and Decisions.

Get your own data-rich cost-effective Business Intelligence (BI) products that fits your unique business processes and includes all the necessary KPIs.

Quickly derive meaningful insights out of your raw data from all the necessary sources, using a single business intelligence data warehouse (DWH).

Predict trends, be informed on any potential business challenges and make well-informed decisions.

We have developed and successfully implemented BI solutions for standard business processes fitting your industry, department, or business function.

Contact us to learn more

Our BI Solutions

Dashboard for Executives

Executives can track all company-level KPIs, aggregated and visualized in one place, for a quick review of performance—for example, of each department like Finance (Gross Profit Margin, EBITDA, Accounts Receivable, and Payable) and Sales (Revenue, Opportunity Pipeline).

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Sales Analytics Solution

For in-depth sales analytics with details in time periods, channels, customers, nomenclature, divisions, managers, suppliers, documents, lots, etc.

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Customer Analytics Solution

Allows you to monitor all relevant customer KPIs and manage the customer base. Provides for the possibility of segmentation and analysis by channels, customers, sales funnel.

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Financial Analytics Solution

Allows you to make sales and budget forecasting (by sales channels, assortment structure, cost structure), analyze the financial indicators (cost, discounts, margins, profits, etc.) and generate standard financial reports (P&L, CF, BS, etc.)

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Accounts Receivable & Cash-flow Analytics Solution

With in-depth analysis of cash-flow and receivables detailed by types and categories of debts, amounts and terms of debts, the ratio of normal and overdue receivables, receivables turnover, etc.

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Supply Chain Analytics Solution

Supply Chain Analytics Solution (Vendors, Logistics, Inventory) with in-depth analysis of supply chain and inventories: cost, illiquid assets and goods with expiration dates; turnover, average balances in days of sales; insurance stocks and stock shortages.

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Marketing Analytics Solution

Created to analyze the effectiveness and further development of the marketing function in the organization. The analysis is carried out through promotion channels and events in relation to commercial and financial indicators.

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HR Analytics Solution

HR Analytics Solution allows you to plan, select, hire, and motivate staff. In-depth analysis of motivation, salary, staff turnover, the effectiveness of training procedures, etc.

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Analytics Solutions by Industry

Help you to enrich your analytics with all the necessary specific industry KPIs

Manufacturing & CPG Analytics

Supply Chain & Logistic Analytics

Marketing & Advertising Analytics

Distribution, Retail, E-commerce Analytics

Travel & Hospitality Analytics

Education Analytics

Software & IT Services Analytics

Healthcare Analytics

BFSI (Banking, Finance, Insurance) Analytics

Healthcare Business Intelligence Solutions

Healthcare Business Intelligence transforms raw healthcare data into actionable insights to enhance healthcare service efficiency and patient care. These solutions are typically implemented through Business Intelligence software, data visualization software, and analytics platforms.

EHR Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence enables healthcare providers quickly analyze and interpret both structured and unstructured data within an Electronic Health Record system. Once a patient's data is entered, immediate analysis is possible, expediting the diagnosis and treatment process.

Healthcare CRM Analytics. This tool allows providers to monitor patient compliance with care plans, identify those lagging, and schedule necessary follow-ups. With our CRM analytics solution, insurers can examine utilization trends to enhance operational efficiency and identify at-risk members neglecting care plans. Medical device firms can identify critical account patterns and proactively engage with clients at high risk of churn. Meanwhile, sales managers can assess their teams' performance.

Pharmacy Business Intelligence. Data analytics enhances store performance assessment, aids in identifying prescriptions due to refill, and categorizes them based on profitability. This strategy can highlight regular patients who haven't visited recently or those with unfilled prescriptions. Proactive outreach, guided by these analytics, can improve patient adherence. Moreover, discerning drugs sold at a loss is key to efficient inventory management and sustaining profitability.

Healthcare IOT Analytics. A unified business intelligence and data analytics platform capable of handling data from diverse medical devices across various manufacturers, overcoming the challenge of non-standardized data structures. The synergy of BI, IoT, and aggregated data across large patient groups uncovers trends and insights. These findings can guide effective treatment strategies and lifestyle management decisions for specific individuals or broader patient groups, such as those with diabetes. IoT data, sourced from health monitors to telematics, also aids insurance companies in reducing risk and promoting premium savings for customers.

Business Intelligence in Transportation Industry

We create custom business intelligence solutions for the logistics and transportation sectors, focusing on data collection and visualization related to clients, freight forwarders, logistics operators, and administrative elements such as warehousing, transport, customs, and ports. For third-party logistics providers, known as 3PLs, we provide real-time intelligence tools specifically designed to improve effectiveness in two key areas: transportation management and inventory. BI solutions of our transportation and logistics software development company offer full supply chain visibility, enriched with live tracking data for complete shipment monitoring. These tools are engineered for a variety of analyses—ranging from carrier performance and mode-cost evaluation to supplier compliance—down to specific functionalities like routing and scheduling, as well as claims analysis. In the domain of warehouse management, our technology specializes in inventory assessment, performance metrics, and space utilization, aiming to reduce distribution costs.

BI and Data Warehouse consulting services

BI and Data Warehouse
We analyze your business workflow and technology infrastructure to understand what you can get with your BI solution.
We prepare documentation on the business, functional and infrastructure requirements for your BI solutions, based on the results of the previous analysis — whether you're building internal dashboards or working with a BI consultant for fintech to support a finance-focused platform.
You get the BI solution roadmap with a data warehouse project implementation plan (schedule and budget) and specification (metrics and indicators for monitoring and evaluation).

DWH, ETL, OLAP Design and Implementation

Data Warehouse

Get a single data warehouse with the necessary databases tailored to the analytical needs of your team and based on your existing technology landscape.

ETL

Get the preconfigured automated ETL processes to eliminate the necessity of using human resources for the routine tasks connected with extraction and data mining, data quality assurance, and processing of various types of data from multiple sources and storing them into the data warehouse.

Data Enrichment

Enrich your data with measures and dimensions that aren’t included in the initial data sets but are required for advanced analytical tasks such as ABC(XYZ)-analysis, ranging, categorization, forecasting, modeling, etc.

OLAP

Get an OLAP database (OLAP cube) - the powerful online reporting and visualization analytical processing system optimized for the fast generation of multidimensional reports by using pre-calculated and pre-aggregated data.

Data Sources
Databases
Flat Files
Marketing Analytics
Social
Media
CRM
ERP
Helpdesk
etc.
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ETL - Real Time

Data Warehouse
Data Marts
Provides data structure for the reports
Simplifies DB queries
Transformations depend on the reports
Warehouse Core
Data storage model
Ensures data quality
Purified data
Complex transformations
Primary data
Provides raw data upload
Decreases system load
Simple transformations
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OLAP — Dashboards

Data Visualization
exel power bi qlik oracle tebleau

BI Reporting & Visualization

BI and Data Warehouse
Get multidimensional reports and visualizations with required measures and dimensions generated from multiple databases using OLAP technology.
Use preconfigured reports’ and dashboards’ templates (BI solutions) adapted for your industry’s business processes with metrics and indicators, including KPIs, under your requirements.
Give your business users the possibility to utilize self-service BI tools for ad hoc requests, reducing the reliance on IT resources.
Use advanced analytics based on statistical and mathematical methods to uncover upcoming trends and risks that are not apparently visible through standard analytics.
You will not be left alone with your new BI solution with our rapid BI training for different users, including data engineers, business analysts, and business users.

Power BI Services

Power BI developers

Hire Power BI developers at Belitsoft to transform raw data into meaningful and actionable information, empowering better decision-making and driving business growth.

Power BI Dashboard Designing
Power BI Development
Integration with Power BI
Power BI Consulting Services
Power BI Predictive Analytics
Support and Maintenance

BI Performance Tuning

Performance

Not happy with the performance of an implemented BI solution? You need BI performance tuning for every phase of the BI lifecycle.

We are here to help you with:

Tuning Techniques for the ETL Phase.
Tuning Techniques for the Query Phase.
Tuning Techniques for the Reporting and Visualizing Phase.

You get the highly performant and scalable BI solution that reduces the time for creating complex reports and visualizations and runs as fast as possible.

BI Security implementation

Onboarding

Be assured that sensitive information from your BI solution is protected from hackers, leaks, and thieves.

With the role-based security, your BI solution will offer different levels of access to users, depending on whether you want to allow them to view all the dashboards/reports, or just some of them, to create dashboard/reports, and so on.

BI Features

Request a custom price quote for your BI System. Use the Features list below
to describe the project and we will get in touch with you within 1 business day.

Choose your industry
Choose the business processes you want to analyze
Choose the necessary dimensions you would like to see in your reports
By Periods
By Customer
By Location
By Supplier
By Organizational structure and staffing
By Product
By Sales documents
By Budget Items
Do you need reports based on advanced analytics methods?
Choose the necessary type:
Which data sources do you use?
Something else?

Portfolio

Professional Services Automation Software to Increase Resources Utilization and Projects Profitability
Professional Services Automation Software to Increase Resources Utilization and Projects Profitability
Belitsoft developed a comprehensive Professional Services Automation (PSA) software. It offers stakeholders centralized access to near real-time analytics and reporting by integrating data from project management tools (such as ClickUp and Jira), accounting, sales, and HR systems.
15+ Senior Developers to scale B2B BI Software for the Company Gained $100M Investment
Senior Developers to scale BI Software
Belitsoft is providing staff augmentation service for the Independent Software Vendor and has built a team of 16 highly skilled professionals, including .NET developers, QA automation, and manual software testing engineers.
BI Modernization for Financial Enterprise for 100x Faster Big Data Analysis
FinTech BI Modernization for 100x Faster Big Data Analysis
A private financial enterprise needed to fully modernize the architecture of a custom Business Intelligence system to effectively identify trends, mitigate risks, enhance customer experience, and optimize operations.
Migration from Power BI service to Power BI Report Server
Migration from Power BI service to Power BI Report Server
Last year, the bank migrated its financial data reporting system from a cloud-based SaaS hosted on Microsoft’s cloud platform to an on-premises Microsoft solution. However, the on-premises Power BI Report Server comes with some critical limitations by default and lacks backward compatibility with its cloud equivalent.
EHR CRM Integration and Medical BI Implementation for a Healthcare Network
Automated Testing for a Healhtech Analytics Solution
The significance of this achievement has garnered the attention of the US government, indicating an intent to deploy the software on a national scale. This unique integration allows for pulling data from EHRs, visualizing them in a convenient and simple way, then allows managing the necessary data to create health programs, assigning individuals to them, and returning ready-to-use medical plans to the EHRs of health organizations.

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Belitsoft Blog for Entrepreneurs
Business Intelligence Implementation
Business Intelligence Implementation
We transform your big data into rich data: dashboards and reports (Excel, Power BI, Web, etc) that are easy to use for making management decisions and get them working for your business. Our prebuilt reporting tools (for the C-Level, Sales Intelligence, Customer Intelligence, Marketing Intelligence, Financial Business intelligence, Supply Chain Intelligence, HR Business Intelligence, and other) let us speed up BI implementation. Talk to our BI implementation consultants BI Project Implementation Steps 1. BI Requirements Gathering, Resource and Funding Plan Do you have a detailed specification document for your new BI system?  This document will let you conduct a step-by-step check of your finished BI solution to see whether it conforms to your wishes at the beginning of the project. Besides, this is the only basis for understanding what your Resource and Funding Plan should be.   Which questions should the specification document answer?  Which employees would use the system? Which business processes that you need to digitize are they responsible for?  Which KPIs and metrics do you need to track in your BI reporting system?  If you don't have a detailed specification document for your new BI system we will provide you with a BI Business Analyst, who may work independently or in tandem with a BI consultant for healthcare or fintech, depending on your domain. These specialists understand the specific regulatory, operational, and performance nuances of your industry and will prepare such specification document for your needs. Our analyst maps out the business processes of your enterprise: He describes the connections between the business processes.  The document lists all the enterprise's functions and key stakeholders responsible for each of them, as well as KPIs and other measures for all the functions.  The resulting map becomes a foundation for the specification, as well as the framework for the future BI system, allowing the correct role-based access model to be developed (which employees will have access to what information) and letting the executives see the relations between the business-critical parameters. The specification is used as a foundation for a Resource and Funding Plan. It will show you:  Implementation steps; Implementation timeline; Implementation costs (human resource involvement on both your and our sides, and project budget). Tell us which core business processes do you need to control and we will provide you with an optimal set of well established KPIs specific to your business. 2. Design and Build a Data Warehouse for Business Intelligence Implementation We have started to implement your BI project.  The purpose of this step is to integrate different sources of your data (Databases, Flat Files, Marketing Analytics, Social Media, CRM/ERP, Helpdesks, etc.) into a single unified source - a so-called “Data Warehouse” database or set of databases.  Let us know which data sources do you need integrated with your BI solution?  Data Warehouse Implementation Steps 1. Developing the data storage structure of the Data Warehouse: which table to use for which kind of data (physical data structure). 2. Developing scripts for each data source to: a) Extract data from them; b) Check data for duplication and other errors, transform the data to fit the technical requirements of the Data Warehouse; c) Load the processed data in the Data Warehouse;  This step is called “ETL processes configuration” (ETL stands for “extract”, “transform” and “load”). 3. Tuning the Data Warehouse to conduct complex calculations - do the so-called “Data Enrichment configuration”. Why do you need this? a) If you need to add value to your existing data by using ABC(XYZ)-analysis, ranging, categorization, forecasting, modeling, etc., you need resource-intensive calculations.  b) You probably know what it’s like to see Excel freeze or stop working. One of the causes of these issues is trying to use Excel for calculating complex metrics, not just to visualize data. Using large amounts of data or complex formulas exacerbates this problem.   According to the best practices in BI development, complex data, including KPIs, should be calculated at the database level (backend) not the visualization tool level (frontend). This will ensure your business reports work quickly and reliably.  4. Connecting Data Warehouse database with OLAP Cube database.  Forming reports for your specialists based on the data stored in the Data Warehouse requires a dedicated developer manually writing database requests. This is, of course, unacceptable for a modern business, so you need to use one more technology - an OLAP Cube database.  For example, you need to create a multidimensional report. Your Data Warehouse has three tables: sales by date, sales by locations, sales by products.  To get a report about the amount of a certain product sold at a certain shop at a certain date the developer needs to write two requests to the Data Warehouse: about the sales on a certain date and about sales at a certain shop. And another request to consolidate the data. This looks inconvenient even at such a simple example. Yet after the OLAP Cube is prepared you don’t need a programmer for making multidimensional reports. Getting one only takes a standard Excel request. The OLAP Cube will do the heavy lifting, as it will have the necessary data and each sale would have the necessary dimensions (“date”, “shop”, “product”).  3. BI Data Visualization The previous steps let us creating the databases and making sure the data is correct. Now we need to work on the Dashboards, Scorecards, and Reports. This step brings you the interfaces that will be used by you or your employees daily. There are three kinds of interfaces: Dashboards with graphs, Scorecards, and Spreadsheet Reports  Dashboards The purpose of the dashboards is to show (even in real-time) the current state of the most important high-level metrics (both for specific processes and the business as a whole), the total indicators. Usually you can’t trace the cause-and-effect relationships here, but that isn’t the goal anyway. Graphs are often present.   Scorecards Scorecards - are a type of dashboards. The difference lies in their purpose. Scorecards demonstrate how the KPIs are being fulfilled (comparison with the planned results and showing deviations). This can be done for separate processes and the business as a whole.   Reports The reports are made to establish the cause-and-effect relationships and a structure within a specific process (the data is later summarised and used for dashboards).  The reports can be pre configured or easily and conveniently adapted by the users themselves without involving analysts, data scientists or IT specialists (self-service multidimensional reports).  4. BI Deployment  You can see the whole picture only after all the previous steps have been completed. Now you know that everything (both calculations and visualizations) works quickly enough (done within a few seconds) and don’t overstrain servers and user computers (so you don’t have to purchase any additional expensive equipment). This is also the time to decide on the optimal periodicity to automatically refresh your dashboards and reports. For example, IOT data needs to be updated in real-time (which leads to higher hardware requirements), but there is no reason to update the ABC-analysis data more often than once a month. 5. BI Security configuration  1. You would probably like to delineate the information access rights for the employees in different positions (e.g. they don’t need to know their co-workers’ salaries unless it is required as part of their duties). We prepare the role-based security that guarantees you flexible control (ease of adding/deleting new users and assigning rights).   2. We sign an NDA with you, providing you with legal protection of your data used over the course of the BI solution development and implementation.   6. BI Training We conduct a brief intensive training on tuning and using the system for different kinds of your users, including data engineers, business analysts, and business users.
Dmitry Baraishuk • 5 min read
Benefits of a Data Warehouse: What You Could Lose Without a DWH?
Benefits of a Data Warehouse: What You Could Lose Without a DWH?
Talk to our data warehouse consultants Benefits of a Data Warehouse over a Database You are using a Database (DB) during your daily activities for entering, storing and modification transactional (that is, statistical) business data. For example, the database of your accounting software or CRM software etc. Database contains detailed information about what you sold to whom and when: the Сustomer #1 from Segment #1 bought three units of the SKU#1 on the 10th of March 2020).  There can be tens of thousands of such entries per day. So you can’t use these data as a basis for decision making without initial preparation. To prepare the data for analysis, you have to: download the data from the DB (the source database); upload it to the special software (e.g. Excel, Power BI, Tableau, etc.); make your calculations. The more calculations you need to do, the more time they take, and the higher the chances of making a mistake are. Only after this, the data can be used for decision making. Data Warehouse A Data Warehouse (DWH), as usual, is a set of databases. A data warehouse stores both statistical and aggregated data. A DWH is created primarily to analyze data for decision making.  A DWH database could be the source of the following aggregated and calculated data: Total Sales (by Location, Category, SKU, Period, and more). For example, all Сustomers from Segment #1 bought 100 000 units of goods from Category #1 brought $1,000,000 in March 2020; Total Sales Growth (by Location, Category, SKU, and more). For example, it increased by 100,000$ or 10% in March 2020 compared with March 2019.  Budget Vs. Actual (by Location, Category, Period, Сustomer Segment, and more). For example, the actual variance is $10,000 or -10%.  and so on. These data can be used to create models, e.g. to predict demand for goods from Category #1 from Сustomers from the Segment #1. The data for the analysis are automatically loaded and precalculated in the DWH so you don’t have to spend financial resources on specialists’ salaries to get analysis-ready information. This also negates the possibility of human error. A data warehouse is different from a database in that it contains aggregated and calculated data for analytical purposes. This is why you can’t do without a DWH if you need analytics for making business decisions. Data Warehouse Benefits for Businesses It’s better to explain the benefits of data warehouse using a contrario reasoning: what you could lose without Data Warehouse? You could lose without DWH: The confidence that your BI tool will run at all. The risk of performance issues (hanging, and crashing) is close to 100% without DWH when yoг deal with the big amount of data. Rather than analyzing data, you will waste time waiting for your BI tool to just work for you. The confidence that your BI tool will work correctly. The risk of business data loss is close to 100% without DWH. Would you like to make mistaken decisions just because the software does not load all the necessary data without you knowing it? Need Data Warehouse Development? Risk of Performance Issues without Data Warehouse Let’s imagine that the source database is your accounting software (like Quickbooks etc.) or your CRM software (like Salesforce or Zoho etc). And you connected it directly to the BI tool (like POWER BI or any else) WITHOUT DWH to get insightful reports and dashboards. You could face the following performance issues while downloading data from the source database. 1. Performance Issues with the source database Let’s imagine that on Monday, at 9 AM the part of your staff is trying to fill the QuickBooks/Salesforce database with new transactional data, and the rest of your staff using POWER BI is trying to get reports from the same QuickBooks/Salesforce database. In this case, both QuickBooks/Salesforce and POWER BI may become unresponsive because high-load resource-intensive POWER BI requests slow down the source database performance. In fact, your staff will waste time waiting for the software to just work. If you connected your accounting/CRM software with the BI tool WITH DWH you prevent such a challenge. With a DWH, performance issues with the source database could be excluded completely because the data will be loaded not from the source database directly, but from the DWH. In turn, the DWH automatically extracts all the data from the source database beyond regular working time, for example at night without hampering others' work. 2. Performance Issues with the BI tool  BI tools always load raw data for analysis (e.g. every transaction for every client at every moment of time). But analytics requires aggregated data (e.g. total monthly sales by product group). These data need to be aggregated and calculated with some sort of software. In this example, we are talking about POWER BI installed on your computer. Its speed depends on the hardware of your computer. So if these PCs weren’t built for such tasks, they can freeze, especially if the volume of data is huge. (A retail shop, for example, can reach 100,000 transactions per day, and to analyze sales over 6 months POWER BI has to process around 2 million transactions or lines of data). Moreover, if you would like to look at the report you’ve been waiting for from a different viewpoint by applying a filter, all the calculations will be redone, because aggregated data wasn’t saved anywhere. A lot of time will be spent waiting for the reports. In fact, WITHOUT a DWH or using in-memory approach you will waste time waiting for your BI tool to just work. WITH a DWH, performance issues with the BI tool could be excluded completely because all aggregations and calculations are premade beforehand in DWH. And you get ready-for-analysis data. WITH a DWH, your BI tool does not spend resources on aggregations and calculations. Risk of Business Data Loss without Data Warehouse At which stages of working with a BI tool could business data loss happen? 1. Errors during the BI data update from a database source Suppose you press the “refresh” button in POWER BI to view the dashboard with the current information from your accounting software of CRM. But this is what could happen: 1.1. Data loss due to the temporary disconnection during the load.  Live loading of data takes time, say about 1 minute. Data exchange almost always happens over the network, be it a local one or the Internet. If there was a glitch during the load time, some data won’t load in the POWER BI. As a result, some sales over a certain period won’t get into the reports, your analytical conclusions would be incorrect, and you won’t even notice that. If the data from the accounting software or a CRM went through a DWH before being uploaded to POWER BI, your DWH would automatically check it for consistency (e.g. by checksum verification). Should the error occur, the DWH will load the missing data automatically.  1.2. Inability to access the data source because of the request limit Suppose you’ve launched a Google Ads marketing campaign for several product groups. You need to estimate your advertising material efficiency for each of them. But you want to not only see which ads are clicked on, but which clicks get converted to revenue so you know where to put your budget to maximize your ROI. To solve this problem you need to upload your QuickBooks sales data filtered by dates and commodity groups and combine it with the Google Ads data on clicks for each ad. But you can only get the Google Ads data via API, which has API Limits and Quotas. The more of your employees need to get such reports and the more reports are compiled daily, the quicker you spend your quota. If you try to get another report after your limit has been reached, you won’t get data. The source would be inaccessible. If the Google Ads data was loaded to a DWH before being transferred to POWER BI you wouldn’t have to make multiple Google Ads requests and use up your limits. You will just use the data that was requested once and stored in the DWH. 1.3. Denial of access to the data source. No connection to a remote DB. Suppose you urgently need to get a report, but there is no connection with a remote DB, for example with QuickBooks Online or Salesforce CRM, because there is maintenance going on. As a result, at 9 AM on Monday you can’t even get the Friday reports, let alone the current ones. If your CRM or accounting software data was routed through DWH before getting to POWER BI, you would still be able to get the reports based on the latest upload. As a rule, the upload happens at least once per day according to the predetermined schedule in the DWH. And if the DWH can’t access the source, it uses a scheduler, using which any process can be automated to run at predefined intervals. The DWH will try over and over again until it gets the data. You can perform synchronizations as frequently as every 5 minutes. 1.4. No access to the historical data at the source If you use third-party resources for getting data (e.g. SaaS platforms) their owners can wilfully clear your historical data and old transactions they deem not relevant anymore. Or they can push you towards using a more expensive subscription plan.  They do it because they don’t want to expand their DB servers, which costs money.  Routing the data from third-party resources to the DWH before it gets sent to POWER BI makes you independent of the third-party data storage policies. 2. Errors during data entry in the source DB For example, your employee could erroneously enter the customer in the CRM or accounting software as “Dylan Soulfrank” while he already exists there as “Dylan Soilfrank” - one letter is different. QuickBooks or Salesforce will perceive it as two separate clients. As a result, you’ll get “Dylan Soulfrank” as a new customer, while “Dylan Soilfrank” will become a lost client because of no new transactions. If you are making a personal customer forecast based on regression (turning to historical data), the data for both accounts would be wrong and you will make an incorrect sales estimate. If the data from your accounting software or a CRM was routed through DWH before getting into POWER BI, your data warehouse expert would notice the spelling error in QuickBooks and would suspect a duplicate. This can be checked and fixed either in the QuickBooks DB, or in the DWH itself. As you can see, connecting a source DB and the BI tool is not enough. You need to think about the place to aggregate and precalculate data and save the calculations. There are technical reasons preventing you from keeping this information in the source DB, as we’ve discussed in the article about differences between data warehouse and database. So you have only one option remaining: store the calculations data within RAM, which will lead to data loss and performance issues. This is why the concept of DWH was developed.
Dmitry Baraishuk • 7 min read
Healthcare Business Intelligence
Healthcare Business Intelligence
Our team of BI developers configures healthcare dashboards and reports for your organization by consolidating data from diverse sources. We offer implementation of Amazon QuickSight, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Google's Looker, Oracle, SAP, Sisense, and more. What is Business Intelligence in Healthcare? Healthcare business intelligence, as a subset of healthcare data analytics, takes historical health-related data from multiple internal and external sources and visualizes it multidimensionally. EHR/EMRs, labs, eHealth/mHealth apps and smart wearables, governmental agencies, accounting tools, and CRM platforms are among some of them. Data is saved, then analyzed, and finally reported. Cloud database development makes the process of healthcare data storage, data retrieval, and data analysis more efficient and secure. Using the information gained, it's possible to improve patient satisfaction and the financial performance of medical centers, clinics, hospitals, insurance vendors, research facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and data technology firms. Top Features to Look For in Healthcare Business Intelligence Software Security. User administration, platform access auditing, authentication management) Cloud-Readiness. The ability to build, deploy, and manage the BI software in the cloud across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Data Source Connectivity. Enabling users to connect to and ingest data from various storage platforms, including on-premises and cloud. Supporting users to combine data from different sources using drag-and-drop. Data Preparation. Creating analytic models with user-defined measures, sets, groups, and hierarchies. Automated Insights, Natural Language Generation, and Data Storytelling. Applying machine learning to automatically generate insights and identify the most important attributes in a dataset. Automatically creating descriptions of insights in data that explain key findings or the meaning of charts or dashboards. Generating news-style data stories that combine headlines, narrative text, data visualizations, and audiovisual content based on ongoing monitoring of findings. Natural Language Searching. Enabling users to query data using terms typed into a search box or spoken. Data visualization. Supporting highly interactive dashboards and exploring data through manipulating chart images, including heat maps, tree maps, geographic maps, scatter plots, and other special-purpose visuals. Reporting. Providing parameterized, paginated, and pixel-perfect reports that can be scheduled and burst to a large user community. Top 7 Business Intelligence Software Tools for Healthcare With an emphasis on visual self-service, today's healthcare BI software incorporates AI and empower non-technical users to model and analyze data and share insights. Gartner lists Amazon QuickSight, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Google's Looker, Oracle, SAP and Sisense among top BI software providers. What possibilities do they bring to health-related companies? #1 Amazon QuickSight The key feature of Amazon's business intelligence tool, QuickSight, is a generative AI assistant named Q. It creates interactive visualizations, dashboards, reports, and customizable data stories on demand—without sending requests to the busy and overloaded BI team or waiting weeks or even months—simply by typing exact questions into the Q bar. Outputs include citations and references for transparency. API access allows integration of this capability into third-party applications. To make this business intelligence tool work, it should have access to your documents, images, files, and other application data, as well as structured data stored in databases and data warehouses. QuickSight connects with over 50 commonly used business tools and unstructured data sources (wikis, intranets, Atlassian, Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, etc.). Get help with Implementing Amazon QuickSight #2 Microsoft Power BI Microsoft Power BI is a comprehensive data analytics tool available as a software-as-a-service option on Azure. It provides data preparation, visual data exploration, interactive dashboards, and augmented analytics. Power BI Premium includes AI-powered text, sentiment, and image analytics. Power BI seamlessly integrates with Office 365, including Microsoft Teams, Excel, and SharePoint. It can be enhanced by embedding Power Apps into its dashboards, and Power Automate flows can automate tasks based on the data. However, Power BI is limited to deployment on Azure and does not offer options for other cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). While data connectivity enables multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios, governance of self-service usage is a common concern. On-premises Power BI Report Server has a more limited offering without features such as dashboards, streaming analytics, prebuilt content, natural language question and answer, automated insights, and alerting. To overcome the limitations of Power BI and use a more integrated analytics experience, as well as fully utilize their data infrastructure, organizations can transition to Microsoft Fabric. Belitsoft offers expert migration services to facilitate this shift, making the transition effortless for your workflows. Get help with Implementing Power BI #3 Tableau Tableau, a product from Salesforce, offers a user-friendly way to access, prepare, analyze, and present data. It empowers business users to explore visually their data with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface powered by the VizQL engine. Tableau provides a natural language query feature called Ask Data that can be integrated into a dashboard, and a data explanation tool called Explain Data. The vendor focuses on extending their natural language generation and data storytelling capabilities. Analysts can curate existing datasets using Lenses and access dashboard accelerators on the Tableau Exchange. The tool also offers centralized row-level security and virtual data connections. However, Tableau's licensing costs are relatively high, with additional fees required for features such as Data Management, Server Management, and Einstein Discovery. Some users report below-average satisfaction with Tableau's overall service and support, making it sometimes challenging to find Tableau-specific assistance. Get help with Implementing Tableau #4 Google’s BI software for healthcare Google's Looker is a cloud-based BI platform that provides users with self-service visualization and dashboard capabilities. It supports multi-cloud scenarios for deployment and database connectivity, with continuous integrations with other Google Cloud products like BigQuery. Looker's extension framework is a fully hosted development surface that allows developers to build data-driven applications. It offers direct query access to cloud databases, lakes, and applications as its primary data connectivity method. This enables users to leverage LookML's virtualized semantic layer without having to move their data. Google aims to open up the LookML data modeling layer to other BI platforms, including Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and its own assets like Data Studio, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Looker's APIs, software development kits, and extension framework, including the Data Dictionary, enable customers to create customer-facing applications and embed analytics in business workflows. The Looker Marketplace offers prebuilt data and machine-learning model Blocks to address common analytical patterns and sources. While Looker may have coding requirements compared to competitors' drag-and-drop data modeling and advanced analytics capabilities, it provides prebuilt data and ML model Blocks to mitigate this. However, Looker currently lacks augmented analytics features for automated insights, data storytelling, and Natural Language Generation, and its Natural Language Query interface is weaker compared to competitors. Get help with implementing Google's Business Intelligence software #5 Oracle Healthcare BI Oracle offers a comprehensive BI cloud solution that includes infrastructure, data management, and analytics applications. With data centers in 30 regions, Oracle supports customers' multicloud needs through an open architecture approach. Oracle focuses on conversational user experiences and automated data storytelling features. These include generating audio podcasts that highlight key trends, data changes, outliers, and contextualized insights. Users can benefit from Natural language queries in 28 languages and Oracle Analytics Day by Day for mobile devices. For on-premises deployments, Oracle offers Oracle Analytics Server, and for Oracle Cloud Applications, prebuilt analytics solutions are available through Fusion Analytics Warehouse. The Oracle warehouse provides native integration for Oracle's ERP, human capital management, supply chain, and NetSuite products. Although Oracle Analytics Cloud can access any data source, its packaged analytic applications (Fusion Analytics Warehouse and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse) are designed specifically for Oracle enterprise applications. Non-Oracle application customers would need to build their own applications using Oracle Analytics Cloud to gain similar capabilities. It's worth noting that customers have reported below-average satisfaction with Oracle's service and support. Additionally, the legacy Oracle Healthcare Foundation (OHF) analytics solution is no longer actively supported. Get help with implementing Oracle Healthcare Business Intelligence software #6 SAP Healthcare BI SAP Analytics Cloud is a cloud-based platform that integrates with SAP cloud applications and can query both cloud and on-premises SAP resources, such as SAP Business Warehouse, for live data. Its user-friendly Story Viewer and Story Designer tools enable non-technical users to create and interact with dashboards and reports. The Analytics Designer, a low-code development environment, facilitates the creation of analytics applications using APIs. SAP Analytics Cloud stands out with its integrated functionality for planning, analysis, and prediction. It offers "what-if" analysis, change tracking, and calculation capabilities. The platform also includes strong functionality for natural language generation, natural language processing, and automated insights. Its integrated functionality for planning, analysis, and prediction sets it apart from other platforms. For the healthcare industry and related lines of business, SAP Analytics Cloud provides pre-built business content, including data models, data stories, and visualizations. However, it is primarily utilized by existing SAP business application customers and legacy business intelligence users. Customers without a SAP-centric application or data ecosystem typically do not opt for SAP Analytics Cloud. While SAP Analytics Cloud is a cloud-native platform that can query on-premises data, customers seeking an on-premises deployment would need to use a standalone SAP BusinessObjects BI to fully leverage the analytics catalog functionality and Universe connector for a complete hybrid deployment experience. Get help with implementing SAP Healthcare Business Intelligence software #7 Sisense Healthcare BI Sisense is a self-service analytics platform that offers advanced analytics and application development capabilities. Many users utilize Sisense in its OEM form. Sisense Fusion focuses on integrating analytics into business workflows, providing interactive visualizations and natural language query capabilities. It offers a microservices-based architecture that is fully extensible, allowing for embedding analytics into applications and workflows. Sisense Notebooks serve as a bridge between data professionals and self-service users who want to perform advanced analysis using SQL, Python, R, and other programming languages. Infusion Apps provide users with prebuilt examples for Google Chrome, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Slack, helping to tie analytics to actions. Sisense Fusion is cloud-agnostic and multicloud-capable, with deep partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft, as well as strong cross-cloud analytics orchestration. Sisense's analytics marketplace is a one-stop shop for publishing and building analytics artifacts, including connectors, applications, and workflows. Sisense can catalog other analytic vendors' assets via APIs, and it offers extensible connectivity to other reporting tools. Developers can utilize the Extense Framework to create custom applications or workflows or choose from prebuilt Infusion Apps for embedding analytic capabilities. However, customers have reported below-average evaluations of third-party resources, such as integrators and service providers, as well as the overall quality of the peer user community. Sisense's service and technical support have also received below-average evaluations. Get help with implementing Sisense Healthcare Business Intelligence software We work with B2B healthtech companies to help their clients make better use of healthcare information. Our developers create custom healthcare software based on their requests. Shortlist our company as your potential partner that has an available pool of talented data analysts and BI consultants for healthcare who can solve any business intelligence challenge by developing, customizing, and implementing complex analytics solutions. Benefits of Business Intelligence and analytics for healthcare organizations BI Consolidates Health Data and Protects It Business intelligence in healthcare is about consolidating clinical, administrative, and financial data. It works even with previously loosely-related systems. But it goes beyond that. Business intelligence tools allow one to protect sensitive patient information. Access to different parts of this data is easily restricted to comply with HIPAA law and more. BI Improves Decision-Making Business intelligence is a holistic visualization of all the KPIs you're tracking. It connects to multiple data sources to put the information into a single, centralized repository - a data warehouse. BI reports and dashboards answer the question "What happened?", and "Why did it happen?" can be explored with drill-down analysis. BI predictive analytics is based on data scientists' calculations. It's often more justified than personal opinions. Machine learning and statistics are unbiased ways to understand "What can we expect as a result?" Simulation and scenario analysis make clear "What actions should we take?" BI Reduces Healthcare Costs Business intelligence can quickly interpret large and complicated data like bills, medical records, and financial statements and provide useful information in a few hours instead of days. Coming from the research on clinical activities, supplies, logistics, costs, and outcomes, a BI helps turn data into timely resolutions. It links and puts together huge amounts of data from providers, life sciences organizations, and insurers to find cost savings, trends, and optimal treatments and medications. With quick situational insights, unexpected challenges can be mitigated, and resources can be used more efficiently. By leveraging built-in AI capabilities, it is possible to predict and plan for future needs. Avoid Costly Readmissions BI software highlights the patients with a certain condition who are readmitted within, for example, 30 days of discharge. It determines the factors contributing to these readmissions, for example, medication non-adherence. Steps to address them may involve providing patients with better education and support to ensure they take their medication correctly or improving follow-up care after discharge. Prevent Chronic Patients From Complications Business Intelligence systems identify the patients with a certain condition are at risk for complications, like foot ulcers or kidney disease. Taking action on these cases in the initial stages leads to more targeted interventions and prevents high expenditures on developed complications. It may concern mostly medication management, acting as reminders for drug refills or pill organizers to help patients stay on track with their treatment regimen. Or it aligns remote monitoring programs that include wearable devices to track blood glucose or blood pressure levels and send alerts to healthcare providers if the levels are outside of the target range. Optimize Healthcare Supply Chain Management In the healthcare sector, supply costs are considerably high. However, leveraging data analysis BI tools holds great potential to bring down these costs. With healthcare supply chain analytics, you can identify and forecast variations in demand or potential supply disturbances, quickly recognize and address supply chain problems, and prevent or ease shortages of medical supplies and drugs. Through monitoring inventory levels and expiration dates, then evaluating usage patterns, it minimizes waste by pinpointing areas where overstocking is taking place and adjusting inventory levels accordingly. Improved Patient Treatment Building a data-driven approach in healthcare propels this domain forward, as 94% of healthcare stakeholders believe. They emphasized the top advantage doctors and patients can leverage from implementing healthcare BI tools and data analytics: a more personalized treatment path. Dmitry Baraishuk Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft on Forbes.com Predicting Surgical Complications Healthcare BI tools with predictive analytics can determine a patient's risk of post-surgical complications, such as kidney failure and stroke. It should develop a special model collaboration with a multidisciplinary team comprising a surgeon, cardiologists, nephrologists, and other specialists. This predictive model determines which patients were likely to suffer a stroke, cardiac event, or die within 30 days of surgery. Health-related providers can use it at a patient's bedside to conduct pre-surgery assessments. Clinicians inform surgeons of potential risks and better advise patients, resulting in improved care delivery. Identify Patterns and Trends in Patient Health Outcomes The organization uses BI tools to analyze data from electronic health records: patient demographics, medical history, and treatment outcomes. Healthcare providers commit a notice. For instance, the patients with a particular condition are experiencing longer hospital stays and higher rates of readmission compared to patients with the same case at other hospitals. The Business Intelligence team works with the hospital staff to examine potential causes, like delays in diagnostic testing, longer wait times for specialty consultations, and slower medication reconciliation processes. After they operate the data to implement targeted interventions, such as optimizing the order of diagnostic tests, reducing wait times for specialty consultations, and streamlining the medication reconciliation process. Because of this interference, the hospital improves better patient outcomes. Limitations of Healthcare Business Intelligence Data entry, management, interpretation, and sharing can often rely on manual processes, which are prone to errors, particularly in the healthcare industry. Without a coherent system of accountability in place, these errors can accumulate and lead to further complications. Healthcare data is a complex and heterogeneous collection originating from various sources and takes many forms. This includes patient profiles, healthcare provider information, pharmaceutical company data, disease registries, diagnostic tests, treatment options, and various types of visual data, such as scans, images, and graphs. The above databases are constantly growing as new admission, diagnostic, treatment, and they add medical records on discharge. The diverse nature of these data sources presents significant challenges with aggregating and integrating the data, constructing a data warehouse, and loading the data into a rules-based engine for generating actionable insights and reports. Reliable Health Business Intelligence depends on accurate data access. Thus, prior to introducing a BI solution, it is vital to configure robust data management. Healthcare Business Intelligence Analyst A skilled BI analyst is essential, especially during the initial configuration of healthcare BI software and self-service tools. Their primary responsibility is to customize data models and dashboards to align with the unique needs of a health-related organization. Business Intelligence Analysts work with company data to identify areas for improvement in current processes and establish metrics or KPIs to track product performance and identify areas of improvement. These analysts possess strong data visualization skills to present their findings in a clear and understandable format to stakeholders. The role of a Business Intelligence Analyst extends beyond reporting. They assist businesses in uncovering insights by asking the right questions and exploring data. BI analysts help to guide organizations to discover new knowledge and find answers to unanticipated questions. To achieve this, BI specialists use a range of tools, including web analytics tools, database tools, ETL tools, and full-stack BI platforms like Power BI or Tableau. Requirements often include: Experience in health informatics and healthcare analytics Ability to analyze data and communicate insights through dashboards and reports Strong SQL programming and advanced data manipulation skills Experience building data products using business intelligence software Familiarity with healthcare data sources, such as claims, electronic health records, and patient-reported data Detail-oriented with a focus on producing accurate and polished work Excellent written and oral communication skills The specific responsibilities of a BI analyst vary depending on the company's needs. Example 1: Devoted Health was seeking a Sales Operations BI Analyst who could work with complex data, communicate insights through data visualization, and prioritize data governance. The ideal candidate would collaborate closely with various teams within the company, including business, data science, product management, analytics engineering, data engineering, and software engineering. Example 2: McLaren Health Care network was in search of a BI analyst to handle healthcare claims and quality data reporting, analytics, and statistical analysis. The ideal candidate would have a strong understanding of healthcare data, including cost of care and patient utilization metrics. Experience in healthcare analysis, including statistical methods, data mining, forecasting, simulation, and predictive modeling, was also required. Example 3: Aledade sought a Business Intelligence Data Analyst to provide continuous analytical support, using operational and clinical data to address pressing business questions, support data operations, and project management functions. This role would be a part of the Business Intelligence team. In each case, the analyst's responsibilities varied, such as: collecting and integrating health plan and internal systems data creating data visualization solutions examining trends, providing actionable insights, and supporting stakeholders with operational and clinical data analysis Other key responsibilities of the Data Analyst included: Developing actionable roadmaps for workflows and processes Setting up and organizing KPIs and timelines for deliverables aligned with team objectives Building interactive dashboards, reports, and data visualizations to effectively communicate insights from data and drive action Assisting in the design and implementation of data warehouse tables or views to support analysis and reporting Supporting the team in research, data analysis, meeting preparation, follow-through, and the development of strategies to address health disparities Proactively identifying and flagging major risks or challenges to draw attention, allocate resources, or implement mitigation steps Example 4: Franciscan Health was seeking a Healthcare Business Data Analyst with the following functions: Identifying and proposing evaluation strategies for key performance indicators (KPIs), quality metrics, outcomes, population management studies, and other relevant areas Developing technical and functional specifications based on business requirements and workflow analysis Managing database processing functions, such as merge/purge, data hygiene, data appends, and coordination with business partners Identifying and addressing data quality issues that may affect reporting, such as duplicate records or missing data Utilizing appropriate programming languages and technologies to extract and process data for business analytics Identifying effective methods of data visualization and presentation to communicate project findings to management Tracking and analyzing trends and relevant measures to maximize database capabilities Integrating add-on programs to optimize back-end processes Acting as a liaison between the analytical needs of departments and business partners Business Intelligence Dashboards for Healthcare Healthcare dashboards allow healthcare organizations, including providers and payers, to gain deeper insights into their data by drilling into trends and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to patients, providers, operational departments, clinical records, and finance. A healthcare dashboard offers users a real-time graphical display of their healthcare KPIs. It enables medical institutions to measure and compare metrics, such as patient satisfaction, physician allocation, Emergency Department Wait Times, and occupied bed count. This tool aids in improving operational efficiency, resulting in better outcomes and more intelligent decisions. Executive KPI Dashboard Many measures are now publicly reported, many of which are directly linked to reimbursement and are critical. It's challenging to prioritize what to work on next and respond to constantly changing needs while having fixed resources to improve patient experience, reduce the cost of care, and improve population health. The Executive KPI Dashboard quickly displays critical KPIs. It is vital to understand the performance clearly and focus the efforts on where it's possible to maximize returns. This dashboard accelerates information sharing and provides a scaffolding to automate the collection of critical data elements and unify analytics across multiple platforms. The Executive KPI Dashboard accomplishes this by using a consistent, simple, and easy-to-understand visualization of the most critical measures. A quick glance at the dashboard shows the state of dozens of KPIs, including the number on each bar, performance against the benchmark, trend over time, and most recent performance. Users can drill down to a linked dashboard to learn more or access reference material, such as an internal wiki page. Additionally, users can view performance through a statistical process control chart, with signals for particular cause variations automatically highlighted. Executive KPI Dashboard. Tableau Hospital Performance Dashboards The department can monitor a hospital's admissions, comparing the number of doctors and average wait time. Such monitoring can facilitate determining the necessary resources required to run each department. Additionally, tracking patient satisfaction provides a means to measure both the performance of doctors and the overall quality of each division. Establishing a relationship between the user and the dimension allows control over which divisions are visible to which users due to security reasons. Hospital Performance Dashboards. Sisense Dashboards for Patient No-Show Data Analysis and Prediction One common issue in outpatient practices is patient no-shows and late cancellations, which lead to decreased revenue for the practice, and longer wait times for other patients. Our aim is to increase patient attendance and reduce last-minute cancellations, to make more patients being seen by healthcare providers. We could use analytics to predict when patients may not show up or cancel at the last minute, allowing us to take a proactive approach to reduce these occurrences. To achieve this goal, we need to identify the breakdown of appointments by various patient characteristics, and then predict which patients are more likely to cancel, and schedule appointments accordingly. As a simple prevention measure, we can also implement tailored appointment reminders. Additionally, using run charts can provide valuable information about attendance trends and fluctuations over time, helping to further refine our predictive models and intervention strategies. Insurance Claims Dashboards To maintain profitability, insurance companies must continuously monitor the claims made under their various policies. This allows them to modify premiums for policies with chief claims ratios or introduce new policies to reduce premiums for their clients. Additionally, identifying the number of claims per customer or policy can help insurers offer cost-effective premiums that benefit both the customers and the company. The insurance analytics dashboard plays a critical role in achieving these objectives. Hire healthcare BI analyst Get Help with Implementing Business Intelligence Software
Dmitry Baraishuk • 15 min read
EHR Data Analytics Solutions
EHR Data Analytics Solutions
Before Extration To host and manage healthcare data for analytical purposes, a separate healthcare analytics database is needed. The raw EHR database data should be converted, preferably adopting the OMOP Common Data Model, to enable systematic analysis with standard analytic tools. Raw EHR databases are usually optimized for fast data entry and retrieval of individual patient records, not for complex analysis. Creating a separate database specifically for analysis can improve query speed and reduce the load on your operational EHR system. Database system development includes database design, implementation, and database maintenance.  Healthcare analytics database design  Conceptual Data Model This is an abstract representation of the data and connections between distinct entities (such as patients, visits, medications) without being tied to a particular database system. Specification of a logical schema The logical schema defines each table needed in your database, like "Patient", "Medication", "Diagnosis". It includes Columns (or fields/attributes) that determine what information goes into each table, such as patient name and date of birth). The Datatypes of the columns, like text, numbers, or dates, are also specified, along with any Constraints like Primary Key - a unique identifier for each row in a table, such as patient ID. Healthcare analytics database implementation This involves creating the actual database based on the logical schema. Examples include optimizing data storage for better performance, implementing security measures to safeguard data, and establishing user interactions with specific data segments. Healthcare analytics database maintenance This entails ensuring the database continues to perform well and adapt to changing needs. Monitoring performance and addressing issues, making changes to the structure as needed, effective communication between healthcare database administrators, developers, and users to determine necessary changes. Our healthcare software development services handle complex challenges of healthcare data analytics, ranging from data extraction to the application of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques. Contact our experts for deeper data insights. Difference between EMR and EHR data Electronic medical records (EMRs) digitize the traditional paper charts found within a specific hospital, clinic, or doctor's office.  Electronic health records (EHRs) are much more comprehensive, as they include all the data found in EMRs as well as information from labs, specialists, nursing homes, and other providers. EHR systems share this data across authorized clinicians, caregivers, and even patients themselves, allowing for coordinated, patient-centered care regardless of location. Besides patient care, EHR data serves administrative and billing purposes.  Recently, EHRs have become a major source of real-world evidence, aiding in treatment evaluation, diagnosis improvement, drug safety, disease prediction, and personalized medicine. We collaborated with a US healthcare solutions provider to integrate EHR with advanced data analytics capabilities. Our integration streamlined data management, empowered healthcare providers, and optimized care delivery processes, resulting in improved patient outcomes and operational efficiency. Check out our case to learn more. The complexity of EHR data demands a multidisciplinary team to handle the challenges at every stage, from data extraction and cleaning to analysis. This team should comprise experts in database, computer science/informatics, statistics, data science, clinicians, epidemiologists, and those familiar with EHR systems and data entry procedures. The large volume of EHR data also causes significant investment in high-performance computing and storage. For more information on effectively leveraging EHR data and healthcare analytics, explore our comprehensive guide on EHR Implementation. Improve patient care and streamline operations with our EHR/EMR software development. From seamless data integration to intuitive user interfaces, our team of dedicated healthcare app developers can tailor to your needs. Get in touch for project planning and preliminary research. Traditional Relational Database Systems  EHR data often fits well into the table format (patients, diagnoses, medications, etc.). Relational models easily define how different entities link together (a patient has multiple visits, each visit has lab results, etc.). Constraints offered by relational databases help maintain data accuracy.  Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL are widely used relational databases in healthcare. Distributed Database Systems   As databases grow massively, traditional systems struggle with performance, especially for analysis and complex queries. Apache Hadoop: The Framework Hadoop lets you spread both storage and computation across a cluster of commodity (regular) computers. The Hadoop Distributed File System can reliably store massive amounts of data on multiple machines. It also offers a programming model for breaking down large-scale analysis tasks into smaller parallel chunks. Apache HBase: The Real-Time, Scalable Database Apache HBase, on the other hand, uses HDFS for storage and is a non-relational database. It is designed to handle semi-structured or unstructured data, borrowing principles from Google's Bigtable solution for managing massive datasets. It enables fast retrieval and updates on huge datasets. NoSQL (like HBase, MongoDB, Cassandra DB) vs. Traditional SQL Databases NoSQL databases excel at handling images, videos, and text documents that don't fit neatly into predefined tables. They store data as "documents" (similar to JSON), providing flexibility in the structure of information stored in a single record. However, NoSQL databases prioritize horizontal scalability (adding more machines to store more data) and may sacrifice some consistency guarantees compared to traditional SQL databases. Data Extraction in Healthcare Inclusion/exclusion criteria may consider patient demographics like age, gender, or race. It can also involve extracting data from various tables in EHR/EMR systems, such as medication, procedure, lab test, clinical event, vital sign, or microbiology tables. However, some of these data or variables may have high uncertainty, missing values, or errors. To aid, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be employed. NLP can analyze text data within EHR/EMR systems to identify relevant mentions that may not be directly linked to expected keywords or codes but are important for analytics purposes. Moreover, accurately identifying missing relationships based on indirect evidence requires substantial domain knowledge. Cohort Identification  Cohort identification selects patients to analyze based on diagnoses, procedures, or symptoms.  Careful definition of the cohort is essential to avoid mixing patients who are too different. Without a well-defined cohort, the analysis will not yield useful insights about any group. Identifying your research cohort in EHR data can be tricky due to input errors, biased billing codes, and missing data.   Phenotyping methods and data types Rule-Based Methods for Cohort Identification ICD codes are a starting point for identifying patients. When studying conditions like heart attacks (acute myocardial infarction), it may seem logical to search for ICD codes specifically linked to that diagnosis. However, relying solely on ICD codes, especially for complex diseases, is often not sufficient. It is important to note that ICD codes are primarily used for billing. Doctors may choose codes that are more likely to get reimbursed, rather than the code that precisely reflects a patient's complex condition. The condition's severity, complications, and management are important factors not easily represented by one code. Errors in data entry or delayed diagnoses can lead to patients having incorrect codes or missing codes. Machine Learning Methods for Cohort Identification Machine learning algorithms can be trained to spot patterns in complex EHR data that may go unnoticed by humans, potentially finding patients that traditional rules might overlook. Clinical notes contain detailed patient information that is not easily organized into codes. NLP techniques help computers understand human language within these notes. Key Tools and Methods MedEx. A specialized NLP system designed to extract medication names, dosages, frequencies, and other relevant information. CLAMP. A broader toolkit that supports various NLP tasks in the medical domain, like identifying diagnoses or medical procedures within the text. OHNLP. A resource hub providing researchers with access to a variety of NLP tools, thereby facilitating their implementation. Complex models like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can effectively identify patterns in large datasets with many variables and patient records. Bayesian methods can help determine disease groups, even in situations where perfect data for comparison is unavailable. The FSSMC method helps cut down the number of variables you need to consider and ranks them based on their predictive utility for disease identification. Methods like clustering can group patients based on similarity, even without predefined disease labels. Simpler approaches can also be used in healthcare analytics for data extraction and transformation. One method is to define data requirements and use ETL pipelines. These pipelines extract data from different sources, transform it, and load it into a target database or data warehouse. ETL pipelines are efficient for processing large volumes of data, ensuring data integrity and consistency for analysis and reporting. While not as advanced as NLP or machine learning, these methods still provide valuable insights and practical solutions for organizations to leverage their data effectively. Leverage your healthcare organization's data analytics with our tailored healthcare business intelligence solutions. Our expert team employs advanced strategies to derive actionable insights from your clinical records and diverse data sources. Contact us now for advanced analytics to improve operations. Data Cleaning in Healthcare The primary purpose of EHR databases lies in supporting the daily operations of healthcare, such as billing, legal documentation, and user-friendliness for clinical staff. However, this singular focus presents challenges for analytics.   The purpose of data cleaning is to ensure that the analysis conducted is meaningful and focused on answering analytics questions, rather than battling errors or inconsistencies. This process aims to achieve a more uniform distribution of lab values. Various tasks fall under data cleaning, such as eliminating redundancies, rectifying errors, harmonizing inconsistencies in coding systems, and standardizing measurement units. Consolidating patient data from various clinical visits that have conflicting records of race, gender, or birthdate. Harmonizing disease diagnosis, procedures, surgical interventions, and other data that may be recorded using varied coding systems like ICD-9, ICD-10, or ICD-10-CM. Correcting variations in the spelling of the same medication's generic names. Standardizing the units used for lab test results or clinical measurements that vary across different patient visits. Data cleaning is essential for the entire EHR database to support all types of projects and analyses, except for projects that focus on studying errors in data entry or management.  Data cleaning methods should be tailored to the specific errors and structure of each EHR database. The provided methods serve as a foundation, but must be customized for each project. The first data cleaning project is usually the most time-consuming, but team experience with the database and common errors can help speed up the process for later projects. EHR data cleaning tools Many existing tools address datasets from specific healthcare facilities or focus solely on one aspect of data cleaning (like standardizing units). Some tools might be better suited for project-specific fine-tuning rather than broad database cleaning. Data Wranglers Data wranglers are tools specifically designed to handle diverse data types and offer transformations like reformatting dates, handling missing values, and pattern detection. Examples: DataWrangler (Stanford) and Potter's Wheel (UC Berkeley). They work with many data formats, help users understand big datasets quickly, and have optimized code for handling large datasets. While adaptable, they might not address the specific complexities and inconsistencies found in EHR data. Specialized EHR data cleaning tools may be necessary for the best results.  Data Cleaning Tools for Specific EHR Datasets  EHR databases can differ in сoding systems (e.g., ICD-10 vs. ICD-10-CM), date formats (European vs. US style), address Formats (country-specific). Because of this, data cleaning tools often need to be tailored to specific EHR database systems. It is unlikely that a single tool will universally apply to all databases. Even if certain tools aren't directly transferable, researchers can still learn valuable cleaning methods and approaches by studying tools like the "rEHR" package. rEHR package acts as a wrapper for SQL queries, making it easier for researchers to work with the EHR database. Statistical data cleaning methods also exist. For example, the Height Cleaning Algorithm detects and removes unlikely height measurements (like negative changes) based on median values across life stages. This algorithm is relatively simple to implement and catches many errors. But there are risks removing rare, but valid, data points (e.g., post-surgery height changes). Healthcare Data Quality Assessment Here's a summary of data quality metrics for assessing EHR data. Checking if data values are within expected ranges and follow known distributions. For example, pulse oximetry values should be between 0 and 100%. Verifying the soundness of the database structure, such as securing each patient, has a unique primary key. Ensuring consistent formatting of time-varying data and logical changes over time. Examining for logical data transitions. For instance, there should be no blood pressure measurements for a patient after their recorded death. However, it is important to note that rare exceptions may exist. Evaluating relationships between attributes, such as confirming a male patient does not have a pregnancy diagnosis. Common EHR Data Errors and Fixing Methods Cleaning methods primarily target tables containing numerical results from encounters, labs, and clinical events (vital signs). Issues with diagnosis codes, medication names, and procedure codes also can be addressed. Demographics Table The demographics table is the cornerstone of data quality assessment. Fixing Multiple Race and Gender Data analysis relies on unique identifier codes for individuals, especially sensitive personal information like medical records, instead of using actual names or identifying information. This is done to protect patient privacy and anonymize the data. It functions as a random ID tied to individuals or samples in the dataset, maintaining their anonymity. "Patient Surrogate Key" (Patient SK) is the unique key for each patient in a medical dataset. Data analysts can track patient records, test results, treatments, etc. without exposing personal information. Multiple demographic entries in a patient's records may have conflicting race or gender information. This is how we fix race/gender inconsistencies: Gather all Patient IDs linked to a given Patient SK, collecting all demographic data associated with that individual. Discard entries with missing race or gender (NULL, etc.) as they are likely incomplete or unreliable. If a clear majority of the remaining entries agree on a race or gender, assign that as the most probable value for the patient. If there is no clear majority, default to the earliest recorded value as a likely starting point. Fixing Multiple Patient Keys for the Same Encounter ID   The error of linking multiple unique patient identifiers (Patient SKs) to the same Encounter ID undermines the EHR database's integrity. If this error is widespread, it reveals a fundamental problem with the database structure itself, requiring a thorough investigation and potential restructuring. If this error occurred rarely, the affected records may be removed. Fixing Multiple Calculated Birth Date   In the healthcare database under analysis, patient age information may be stored across multiple fields—years, months, weeks, days, and hours. There are three scenarios for recording a patient's age: All age fields are blank, indicating missing age information. Only the "age in years" field is filled, providing an approximate age. All age fields (years, months, weeks, days, hours) are filled, allowing for precise calculation of the patient's age. It is important to consider that each patient's records may cover multiple visits, and the age values may vary between these visits. To determine the accurate birth date, we follow a systematic procedure: If all recorded ages are blank, the birth date is missing and cannot be calculated. If all ages have only the years filled, we either use the birth year indicated by the majority of encounters or the first recorded age in years as an approximation of the birth year. If at least one encounter has all age fields filled (third scenario), we calculate the birth date from the first such encounter.   This procedure ensures that we derive the most accurate birth date value possible from the available data fields. Lab Table Large EHR databases are used by multiple healthcare facilities. Each facility may use different kits or equipment to evaluate the same lab measurement. This leads to varying normal reference ranges for measurements, like serum potassium level. Additionally, EHR system providers allow each facility to use customized data entry structures.  These two factors resulted in multiple formats being used to report the same lab measurement.  For example, in one dataset, serum potassium level was reported using 18 different formats! Another major issue plaguing EHR data is inconsistency during data entry.  In an example database, it was noticed that some electrolyte concentration levels were incorrectly reported as "Millimeter per liter" instead of the common "Millimoles per liter" format.  Another common mistake is mixing and confusing the lab IDs for count versus percentage lab results.  This is prevalent in measurements related to White Blood Cells (WBC). For example, the database can have different lab ID codes for Lymphocyte Percentage (measured as a percentage of the total WBC count) and the absolute Lymphocyte Count. However, due to operator misunderstanding or lack of awareness, the percentage of lymphocytes is sometimes erroneously reported under the lab ID for the lymphocyte count, with the unit of measurement also incorrectly listed as a percentage. Instead of deleting these mislabeled values, which would increase the amount of missing data and introduce bias, we can develop a mapping table approach. This involves creating a conversion map to consolidate the data and make the reporting format uniform across all entries. Specifically, we can map the mislabeled percentage values to their appropriate lab ID code for the lymphocyte percentage. By employing this mapping, we are able to resolve the data entry errors without losing valuable data points. Developing Conversion Map Flow chart of the lab unit unification algorithm Conversion map example The conversion map is a table that helps us convert lab data from different formats into a unified representation. We use mathematical formulas in the Conversion Equation column to transform the original values into the desired format. If the original and target formats have similar distributions, no conversion is necessary. But if they are different, we need to find the appropriate conversion equation from medical literature or consult with clinicians. To handle extreme or invalid values, we incorporate Lower and Upper Limits based on reported value ranges in medical journals. Values outside these limits are considered missing data.   General strategies for managing the output of the data cleaning process When working with large EHR datasets, it is necessary to keep the unique identifiers in your output unchanged. These identifiers are required for merging data tables during subsequent analyses. It is also advised to be cautious when deciding to remove values from the dataset. Unless you are certain that a value is an error, it is recommended not to drop it.   To maintain a comprehensive record of the data cleaning process and facilitate backtracking, we save the results and outputs at each step in different files. This practice helps you keep track of different file versions. When sharing cleaned data with different teams or data analysis users, it is helpful to flag any remaining issues in the data that could not be addressed during cleaning. Use flags like "Kept," "Missing," "Omitted," "Out of range," "Missing equation," and "Canceled" for lab data. Clinical Events The clinical event table, specifically the vital signs subgroup, has a similar structure to the lab table in EHR databases. So, you can apply the same steps and approaches from the data cleaning tool to the clinical event table. However, it is important to note that this table may also contain other inconsistencies. Variable Combining   In the clinical event table, a common issue is the use of unique descriptions for the same clinical event. This happens because multiple healthcare facilities use the database, each with their own labeling terminology. To tackle this challenge, statistical techniques and clinical expertise are used to identify events that can be combined into one variable. For instance, there are many distinct event code IDs for the Blood Gas test, some with similar descriptions like "Base Excess," "Base Excess Arterial," and "Base Excess Venous." Once expert clinicians confirm these labels can be combined, a decision can be made to consolidate them into a single variable.   Medication Table Medication tables present their own unique challenges and inconsistencies that require different strategies. The data in the Medication table consists mainly of codes and labels, not numerical values. When working with this table, using generic medication names is more efficient than relying solely on medication codes (like National Drug codes). However, even within the generic names, there can be inconsistencies in spelling variations, capitalization, and the use of multiple words separated by hyphens, slashes, or other characters.  Procedure Table Procedure codes identify surgical, medical, or diagnostic interventions performed on patients. These codes are designed to be compatible with diagnosis codes (such as ICD-9 or ICD-10) to ensure proper reimbursement from insurance companies, like Blue Cross Blue Shield or Medicare, which may deny payment if the procedure codes do not align with the documented diagnosis. Three types of procedure codes are commonly used.  ICD-9 procedure codes Consist of two numeric digits followed by a decimal point, and one or two additional digits. They differ from ICD-9 diagnosis codes, which start with three alphanumeric characters. ICD-9 procedure codes are categorized according to the anatomical region or body system involved. CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) codes Also known as Level 1 HCPCS (Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System) coding system, CPT codes are a set of medical codes used to report medical, surgical, and diagnostic procedures and services. Physicians, health insurance companies, and accreditation organizations use them. CPT codes are used in conjunction with ICD-9-CM or ICD-10-CM numerical diagnostic coding during electronic medical billing. These codes are composed of five numeric digits. HCPCS Level II codes Level II of the HCPCS is a standardized coding system used primarily to identify products, supplies, and services, such as ambulance services and durable medical equipment when used outside a physician's office. Level II codes consist of a single alphabetical letter followed by four numeric digits. The data cleaning for the procedure table often may not be necessary. The data analysis framework, which involves multiple steps iteratively Healthcare Data Pre-Processing   Variable Encoding   When working with EHR datasets, the data may contain records of medications, diagnoses, and procedures for individual patients.  These variables can be encoded in two ways:  1) Binary encoding, where a patient is assigned a value of 1 if they have a record for a specific medication, diagnosis, or procedure, and 0 otherwise.  2) Continuous encoding, where the frequency of occurrence of these events is counted.   Tidy Data Principles  Variable encoding is a fundamental data pre-processing method that transforms raw data into a "tidy" format, which is easier to analyze statistically. Tidy data follows three key principles: each variable has its own column, each observation is in one row, and each cell holds a single value.  Variables are often stored at different tables within the database. To create a tidy dataset suitable for analysis, these variables need to be merged from their respective tables into one unified dataset based on their defined relationships. The encounter table within an EHR database typically already meets the tidy data criteria. However, many other tables, such as the medication table, often have a "long" data format where each observation spans multiple rows. In these cases, the long data needs to be transformed. A diagram illustrates how the principles of tidy data are applied. Initially, the medication table is in a long format, with multiple treatment variables spread across rows for each encounter ID To create a tidy dataset, we follow a few steps: Each variable is put into one column. The multiple treatment variables in the medication table are transformed into separate columns (Treatment 1, Treatment 2, Treatment 3, Treatment 4) in the tidy data. This ensures that each variable has its own dedicated column. Each observation is in one row. The encounter table already has one row per encounter observation. After merging with the transformed medication data, the tidy dataset maintains this structure, with one row representing all variables for a single patient encounter. Each cell has a single value. In the tidy data, each cell contains either a 1 (treatment given) or 0 (treatment not given). This adheres to the principle of having a single atomic value per cell. The merging process combines the encounter table (with patient ID, encounter ID, age, sex, and race variables) and reshaped medication data to create a final tidy dataset. The merging process combines the encounter table and reshaped medication data to create a final tidy dataset. Each row corresponds to one encounter and includes relevant variables like treatments, demographics, and encounter details. Feature Extraction: Derived Variables  Сertain variables, such as lab test results, clinical events, and vital signs, are measured repeatedly at irregular time intervals for a patient Instead of using the raw repeated measurements, feature extraction and engineering techniques are applied to summarize them into derived feature variables.  One common approach is to calculate simple summary statistics like mean, median, minimum, maximum, range, quantiles, standard deviation, or variance for each variable and each patient. Let's say a patient's blood glucose levels are recorded as follows: 90, 125, and 100. Features such as mean glucose (105), maximum glucose (125), and glucose range (35) could be implemented. Derived feature variables can also come from combining multiple original variables, such as calculating body mass index from height and weight.  Additionally, features related to the timing of measurements can be extracted, such as the first measurement, the last measurement, or measurement after a particular treatment event. The goal is to extract as many relevant features as possible to minimize information loss. Dimension Reduction  Variable Grouping or Clustering Many EHR variables, such as disease diagnoses, medications, lab tests, clinical events, vital signs, and procedures, have high dimensions. To reduce data complexity, we can group or cluster these variables into higher-level categories. This also helps to ensure a sufficient sample size for further analysis by combining smaller categories into larger ones. For example, the ICD-9-CM system comprises over ten thousand diagnosis codes. However, we can use the higher-level ICD-9-CM codes with only three digits, representing less than 1000 disease groups.  Healthcare Data Analysis and Prediction Statistical Models  EHR datasets are big, messy, sparse, ultrahigh dimensional, and have high rates of missing data. These characteristics pose significant challenges for statistical analysis and prediction modeling. Due to the ultrahigh dimensionality and potentially large sample sizes of EHR data, complicated and computationally intensive statistical approaches are often impractical. However, if the dataset is properly cleaned and processed, certain models, like general linear models, survival models, and linear mixed-effects models, can still be appropriate and workable to implement. Generalized linear models (GLMs) are commonly used and effective for analyzing EHR data due to their efficiency and availability of software tools. For time-to-event analysis, survival regression models are better suited than GLMs, but they need to account for issues like missing data and censoring in EHR data. Mixed-effects models are useful for handling longitudinal EHR data with repeated measures and irregular timing. Dealing with the high dimensionality is a major challenge, requiring techniques like variable screening (SIS), penalized regression (LASSO, Ridge), and confounder adjustment methods. Large sample sizes in EHR data pose computational challenges, requiring approaches like divide-and-conquer, sub-sampling, and distributed computing. Neural Network and Deep Learning Methods Deep learning (DL) is a class of machine learning techniques that uses artificial neural networks with multiple hierarchical layers to learn complex relationships between inputs and outputs. The number of layers can range from a few to many, forming a deeply connected neural network, hence the term "deep" learning. DL models have input, hidden, and output layers connected through weights and activation functions. DL techniques are increasingly applied to various aspects of EHR data analysis due to their ability to handle high dimensionality and extract complex patterns. Deep learning approaches can be categorized as supervised learning for recognizing numbers/texts from images, predicting patient diagnoses, and treatment outcomes, and unsupervised learning for finding patterns without predefined labels or target outcomes. Supervised learning is the most developed category for EHR data analysis. DL has some advantages over classical machine learning for EHR data: Can handle both structured (codes, tests) and unstructured (notes, images) data Can automatically learn complex features from raw data without manual feature engineering Can handle sparse, irregularly timed data better Can model long-term temporal dependencies in medical events Can be more robust to missing/noisy data through techniques like dropout However, DL models require careful hyperparameter tuning to avoid overfitting. Types of Deep Learning Networks Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) The foundational DL model, with multiple layers of neurons. Good for basic prediction tasks in EHR data. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) Excels at analyzing data with spatial or local relationships (like images or text). Used for disease risk prediction, diagnosis, and understanding medical notes. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) Designed for sequential data (like EHRs over time). Can account for long-term dependencies between health events. Used for disease onset prediction and readmission modeling. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) A unique approach where two networks compete. Used for generating realistic synthetic EHR data and disease prediction. Choosing the Right Architecture CNNs are great for images and text. GANs offer more flexibility (data generation, prediction) but can be harder to train. RNNs are good for long-term dependencies but can be computationally slower. Deep Learning Software Tools and Implementation  TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and others offer powerful tools to build and train DL models. They are often free and constantly updated by a large community. Online tutorials and documentation make learning DL more accessible. TensorFlow Mature framework, easy to use, especially with the Keras open-source library that provides a Python interface for artificial neural networks). It has a large community and is production-ready, with good visualization tools. However, it may have less of a "Python-like" feel in its basic form and there may be potential compatibility issues between versions. PyTorch Feels like standard Python coding, easy to install and debug, offers more granular control of the model. However, without Keras, it requires more coding effort and the performance can vary depending on how you customize it. We have a team of BI analysts who tailor solutions to fit your organization's unique requirements. They create sharp dashboards and reports, leveraging advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to uncover valuable insights from complex healthcare data. Contact our experts to integrate BI for a comprehensive view of patient care, operations, and finances.
Alexander Suhov • 19 min read
Business Intelligence Consultant for Fintech
Business Intelligence Consultant for Fintech
Fintech Segments That Hire Business Intelligence Consultants Neobanks (Digital-Only Banks) Digital banks don’t have branches or tellers. Their only real-world footprint is the data trail their users leave behind: login patterns, spend habits, churn events, drop-off flows.  BI in a neobank environment answers questions the CEO is already asking: Where are we “bleeding” in the funnel? What’s our fraud exposure today, not last quarter? Which users should we invest in retaining and which should we quietly let churn? Which features are sticky? And BI doesn’t just report; it drives actions. A consultant might flag a spike in failed logins in a specific zip code, triggering fraud mitigation protocols. Or identify a high-performing onboarding path that can be replicated in a new feature. These are the kinds of insights that move CAC, LTV, and NPS: the CEO-level numbers that ultimately determine valuation. Growth, Retention, and Spend Efficiency  Neobanks compete on slim margins. Every ad dollar has to work. That’s why BI consultants are often embedded with growth teams, analyzing: Which acquisition channels yield high-LTV customers? What’s our CAC by segment or cohort? Which incentives convert one-time users into daily ones? This isn’t just about visualizing the funnel but optimizing it. BI experts connect the dots between marketing analytics, in-app behavior, and user segmentation: you’re not just acquiring users but the right ones. In markets with high churn and expensive acquisition, that’s the difference between Series D and getting delisted. BI Drives Product  Product intuition in a digital bank is incomplete without analytics. BI consultants feed product managers the behavioral fuel they need to prioritize: Which parts of the registration flow lose the most users? Are users really using that new savings feature, or just clicking in and bouncing? Does adding another KYC step kill conversion or reduce fraud? Consultants surface these patterns early - often before they show up in revenue or support tickets. That’s what makes them so powerful. They shift teams from reacting to preempting. Chime is the example here. Their BI and analytics team sits with product and marketing: building the metric frameworks that define success, guiding feature rollout, and shaping long-term roadmap decisions. BI is part of their DNA, not an afterthought. In 2025, the firms that lead in fintech are insight machines. And the companies who know how to operationalize BI, not just to monitor, but to inform and optimize - are the ones building market advantages. When your fintech team needs more than just reports but real-time analytics, our experienced BI consultants and development team turn your data into action. We build custom dashboards, predictive models, and decision-ready analytics tools tailored to your product and users. Payment Platforms (Payments and Digital Wallets) The payment stack looks deceptively clean to the customer: swipe, tap, done. But under the hood? It’s a spiderweb: acquirers, processors, fraud engines, banks, FX services, regional gateways, and APIs that all have to handshake in milliseconds. Every one of those layers produces data. And unless you have the BI expertise to aggregate, reconcile, and interpret it - you’re blind. BI consultants in this space are solving hard problems: Why did a merchant’s authorization rate dip 3% last Thursday? Why is a specific gateway showing latency spikes during peak hours? Which payment methods are growing fastest by geography and margin? Without that clarity, you’re firefighting. Operational Intelligence Payment firms build dashboards tracking: Success vs. failure rates, by method and region Average transaction value and volume Latency by gateway, issuer, or network Error codes tied to specific banks or devices This data isn’t just for engineers - it’s for executives. A spike in transaction failures in Latin America? BI surfaces it first. A partner gateway degrading slowly across a week? The BI team shows the trend before support tickets pile up. This visibility directly protects revenue - by detecting performance issues before they become churn events. Stripe, for example, built live dashboards that track the global health of its payments infrastructure, not just for technical health, but business impact. That’s the difference between passive monitoring and business-aware analytics. Revenue, Risk, and Optimization BI stitches together what most organizations still treat as separate: Revenue insights: Who’s transacting the most? Which cohorts drive margin? User behavior: Which payment methods convert best by segment or region? Fraud detection: What anomalies are just edge cases - which are early signals? The best BI consultants bridge these questions in the same dashboard. They help risk teams build fraud scoring models without killing user experience via false declines. They help product teams understand which payment options are underperforming and why. They help revenue teams isolate profitable merchant tiers and optimize pricing. For companies like PayPal, these BI-driven insights directly inform which partnerships to prioritize, which UX flows to AB test, and which countries to double down on for growth.  BI Is the Compass Whether it’s Stripe expanding into new markets, or Square introducing BNPL features, those moves are backed by BI: What’s our volume by vertical in this region? What’s the fraud profile for the top 5 banks in the market? Can our infrastructure sustain another 100k users per day at current latency? BI teams provide the answers: in dashboards, in forecasts, in decision memos. They don’t just answer what’s happening. They model what’s next. Stripe’s internal BI team builds the metrics infrastructure that leadership runs the business on. They’re involved in product planning, operational readiness, and even feature deprecation, because everything touches the data. Lending Platforms (Digital Lending and BNPL) Credit Risk Isn’t Static From education history to bank cashflows, mobile phone usage to payroll APIs: the underwriting model is only as smart as the data behind it, and that’s where BI consultants come in. They surface correlations, test segment performance. They determine whether a borrower who scores 660 but has a recent college degree and three months of perfect neobank activity is a risk - an opportunity. Affirm’s entire underwriting model lives and dies by one question: what default rate are we accepting at this level of loan approval? BI teams track that in real time. The model may approve 70% of users, but if loss rates creep from 2.1% to 2.8%, someone has to catch it - and fast. That’s the job of BI.  Portfolios Need Radar Once loans are disbursed, it’s not just about waiting for repayment. It’s about active portfolio surveillance. Which cohorts are going sideways? Which geographies are softening? Is BNPL delinquency rising among Gen Z shoppers in fashion retail but not in travel? BI consultants power dashboards that answer these questions daily - by segmenting portfolio data across behavior, demographics, and payment patterns. Collections teams don’t blast everyone anymore. They target likely-to-cure segments first, based on repayment history and contact method effectiveness. That’s BI applied directly to recovery - turning analytics into dollars reclaimed. In many platforms, a 1–2% lift in collection rates across at-risk segments can unlock millions in preserved revenue. BI is how that happens. Growth That Pays for Itself Customer acquisition isn’t just a marketing function anymore, but it’s an analytical battlefield. CAC, drop-off rates, cost-per-funded-loan, funnel velocity - BI consultants run these models. And they’re not just measuring. They’re shaping targeting strategies. BI tells SoFi which ones bring good borrowers: high FICO, low churn, high cross-sell uptake. BI tells Upstart if a cleaner UX after A/B test of web pages increased completion from qualified users, not just more volume. Even pricing is analytics-driven. Want to bump conversion? Offer 1% lower APR, but only for segments with high predicted repayment likelihood. BI makes it possible to do that surgically, not by blunt discounting. This is where growth and risk get braided together, and BI is the unifier. Strategic BI Every lending decision has a downstream effect: risk, revenue, capital burn, regulatory exposure. And as markets fluctuate, capital costs shift, and borrower behaviors evolve: BI gives leadership the real-time radar to steer. You can’t afford to review performance quarterly. It has to be continuous recalibration. Upstart and Affirm are models of this in action. Their BI teams sit in daily standups with product, growth, and credit policy, pushing insights upstream into decision-making. When loss rates nudge, when default curves change, when new user behavior signals emerge, BI flags it before it shows up in charge-off reports. Insurtech (Insurance Technology Firms) CEOs leading insurtech ventures know that your value proposition is only as strong as your visibility into risk, claims, and customer behavior.  Pricing Risk is About Pattern Recognition Underwriting is the heart of the business. BI consultants here don’t just build dashboards. A BI-driven insurtech can analyze telematics, IoT feeds, weather models, historical claims, and demographic data, and then push it all into pricing models that can segment customers with precision. A user drives aggressively but only during the day? Adjust pricing accordingly. Claims spike in flood zones following two weeks of rainfall? Adjust exposure models in real time. A new cohort of Gen Z pet owners? Predict claims patterns before the actuaries catch up. This is where BI merges with predictive analytics.  Claims Are Where You Make (or Lose) Trust and Margin Claims management is where most insurers lose customer loyalty and money. It’s also where BI makes the biggest operational impact. BI dashboards monitor: Claim volume by region or cause Time to first contact, time to payout Approval vs. denial rates Anomalous behaviors or patterns that suggest fraud The key advantage? Proactive visibility. When a claims region is lagging, BI shows it. When a claim looks suspicious, BI flags it, not after the payout, but as it’s being processed. Lemonade has used this kind of data to deliver on its instant-payout promise, even as it scales.  From Mass Coverage to Micro-Personalization BI is also the engine behind product innovation. What riders are being added most? Which customer profiles are buying bundled coverage? Who’s likely to churn next quarter? This isn’t just CRM territory. It’s profitability intelligence: Which products deliver healthy loss ratios? Which customer segments drive margin vs. loss? Where can you push growth without spiking risk? Personalization in insurtech isn’t just a better quote flow. It’s using BI to match risk appetite with customer demand at scale. And BI doesn’t stop at customer insights. It drives capital allocation and regulatory posture. Whether it’s surfacing trends for board-level strategy or calculating reserve requirements for auditors - BI keeps the business compliant, informed, and agile. Lemonade: A Case Study in BI-Led Growth Lemonade didn’t just build an app. It built a BI platform that feeds product, pricing, marketing, and ops from a single source of truth. Their Looker-based system allows cross-functional teams to pull consistent KPIs, explore product performance, and spot new opportunities before competitors react. They didn’t guess at pet insurance or car insurance - they launched them based on customer data and BI-led opportunity mapping. That’s BI as product strategy - not back-office analytics. Wealthtech (Investment and Wealth Management Fintechs) AUM Is Not Just a Metric Your total assets under management (AUM) are the single biggest indicator of scale and trust. But AUM on its own is static. BI gives it motion: Where is AUM growing or shrinking: by cohort, by feature, by time of day? What’s the breakdown of recurring contributions vs. one-time deposits? How do performance returns compare against benchmarks and are users actually beating inflation? A strong BI layer doesn’t just report AUM. It explains it.  Betterment and Wealthfront are classic examples: they don’t just track daily balances. They correlate changes with user actions, product launches, or marketing campaigns. They know what’s driving growth, not just that it’s happening. Even trading spread revenue or advisory fees become BI artifacts. How much are you earning per user segment? Which services are most profitable per dollar of dev effort? Where is the cost-to-serve highest? In a market that’s increasingly margin-compressed, BI is your profitability microscope. Engagement Isn’t Just Retention Wealthtech lives and dies by active use. Inactive users don’t deposit. They don’t upgrade. They churn silently. BI helps you surface: Login and session patterns Feature interaction funnels Abandonment triggers (drop-off in funding flows or rebalancing features, etc.) You’re not just asking “how many users logged in today?” You’re asking: “which behaviors correlate with retention?” “Which feature launches actually move engagement?” “Where are people stalling in their first 30 days?” Wealthfront tracked how often users engaged with the app and used color-coded thresholds: green for healthy activity, yellow for drop-off, red for risk. Then they built features specifically aimed at improving those numbers. If your product roadmap isn’t shaped by this kind of BI telemetry, you’re iterating blind. You may be wasting dev cycles on features that look cool but don’t drive deposits or loyalty. Personalization Is the Monetization Engine All wealthtechs talk about personalized finance. Few deliver on it.  With the right BI systems, you can: Segment users by behavior, demographics, risk tolerance, financial goals Trigger personalized messaging, offers, or dashboard layouts Recommend the next best action: contribute, rebalance, upgrade A BI consultant might build a model that predicts which users are at risk of cashing out and trigger educational content or support follow-up before they go dark. Or you might run a segmentation analysis and discover that high-LTV users engage more with tax-loss harvesting tools, so you elevate that feature in the dashboard for similar users. Robinhood didn’t add crypto trading because someone had a hunch. They saw where user interest was spiking. BI flagged the signal, and the product followed. BI: From Compliance to Strategy in Real Time And then there’s the backend value: compliance. Regulatory reporting, audit trails, capital exposure - it all flows through the BI layer. The real upside is how BI aligns the whole business:   Product: “Which features actually move AUM?” Growth: “Which channels bring in the most profitable users?” Support: “Where are users stuck, and what’s causing ticket spikes?” Leadership: “Where should we invest headcount and capital next quarter?”   Betterment’s use of Looker dashboards to democratize visibility means every employee has access to real-time data. When everyone can see the score, everyone plays the game better. Blockchain/Crypto Firms BI as the Trading Floor Control Panel Crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken operate more like infrastructure providers than traditional brokerages. Every second, they’re processing thousands of trades across dozens (or hundreds) of assets. BI consultants are the ones turning that firehose into intelligence. Key metrics tracked in real time: Volume by asset, trading pair, and region Liquidity and bid-ask spreads Order book depth and volatility Exchange fee revenue by customer segment Custodial asset value on-platform If trading volume on a specific token spikes, your infrastructure needs to scale. If liquidity dries up on a new pair, BI surfaces it before users feel it. If fees drop below profitability thresholds, BI raises the flag. And with on-chain activity now part of the data stack, BI teams even monitor blockchain inflows/outflows - spotting demand signals before they hit the platform. Your next most profitable trading pair? BI already saw it coming. Know Your Users - Or You’re Building for Ghosts Crypto platforms serve wildly different personas. The same interface may host: Passive holders checking price once a week High-frequency traders with custom APIs Users bridging tokens from L2s to mainnets NFT collectors Stakers and DeFi liquidity providers You can’t build one product for all of them. BI tells you who’s who - and what they want. At Coinbase, data analysts routinely cluster users by behavior — frequency, volume, asset mix, wallet age — and use those clusters to define roadmap priorities. New mobile features? Tailored for casual users. Advanced order types? Built for the top 5% of trading volume. This segmentation powers precision product strategy. Without it, you’re flying blind, building what you think users want — not what the data proves they’ll use. BI Is the First Line of Defense In crypto, the speed of fraud is fast. You don’t get weeks to detect patterns. You get minutes - if you’re lucky. BI teams in crypto companies are wired into: Anomaly detection ( sudden spike in withdrawals or trading from flagged IPs, etc.) Real-time exposure to volatile assets AML monitoring and suspicious activity pattern recognition KYC funnel conversion and identity risk scoring BI supports reporting, too — surfacing metrics for regulators, partners, and internal risk committees. Coinbase’s internal risk scores, lifetime value models, and fraud prediction systems are built off BI-led integrations between blockchain data, transaction logs, and user accounts. BI Isn’t just a Function  When Chainalysis decides which chains to support next, it’s not guessing. It’s analyzing: Market data demand User behavior across clients On-chain activity trends That’s BI, not product management alone. When Coinbase runs promotions or referral programs, they’re targeting users with modeled lifetime value curves — shaped by BI. In crypto, the feedback loop is faster, the cost of delay is higher, and the opportunity window is shorter. BI enables your team to react in time — or, more often, to act before the market moves. How Belitsoft Can Help Belitsoft is the technical partner fintechs call when they need BI that does more than visualize - BI that operates in real time, predicts what’s next, and supports business-critical decisions across risk, growth, and product. BI Consulting and Strategy Design Help fintech firms define KPI frameworks tailored to each segment: onboarding funnels for neobanks, fraud triggers for payment platforms, claim efficiency for insurtechs. Build BI roadmaps to connect siloed departments (product, risk, ops, marketing) through shared, actionable data. Custom BI Infrastructure Development Build data pipelines, ETL processes, and dashboards from scratch - using Looker, Power BI, Tableau, or open-source stacks. Integrate data from multiple sources (CRM, mobile apps, APIs, transaction logs, KYC systems) into a unified reporting platform. Behavioral Analytics & Predictive Modeling Implement machine learning models to predict churn, fraud, repayment likelihood, or upsell potential. Analyze user actions (logins, clicks, conversions, claims filed) to segment customers and drive retention or LTV. Embedded Analytics in Custom Fintech Platforms Build platforms with BI built-in — not just for internal reporting but to give users real-time views of their own data (AUM growth, spend insights, creditworthiness, etc.). Design admin dashboards for compliance, audit, or operational oversight. Risk, Compliance, and Regulatory Reporting Tools Automate report generation for audits, board meetings, and regulators. Ensure secure handling of sensitive financial/insurance data — complying with GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or other frameworks. Ongoing BI Operations and Support Offer BI-as-a-service: ongoing support for dashboard updates, data quality management, or metric tuning. Help internal teams become self-sufficient with data through training or embedded analysts. Partner with dedicated Power BI developers and BI consultants for fintech from Belitsoft who collaborate directly with your team. Our experts design secure, tailored analytics solutions, from Power BI dashboards to full-scale data systems, backed by deep technical and industry know-how. Contact for a consultation.
Alexander Suhov • 12 min read
Data Warehouse vs Database
Data Warehouse vs Database
Talk to our data warehouse consultants Data Warehouse vs Database Of course, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. The more detailed picture demonstrates that it's more cost-effective to use the right tool for the job. A Database is used for storing the data. A Data Warehouse is used for the analysis of data. Database You are using a Database (DB) during your daily activities for entering, storing and modification transactional (that is, statistical) business data.  This can be detailed information about what you sold to whom and when: the Сustomer #1 from Segment #1 bought three units of the SKU#1 on the 10th of March 2020).  There can be tens of thousands of such entries per day. So you can’t use these data as a basis for decision making without initial preparation.  To prepare the data for analysis, you have to :  download the data from the DB; upload it to the special software (e.g. Excel, Power BI, Tableau, etc.); make your calculations. The more calculations you need to do, the more time they take, and the higher the chances of making a mistake are.  Only after this, the data can be used for decision making. Data Warehouse A Data Warehouse (DWH), as usual, is a set of databases. A data warehouse stores both statistical and aggregated data. A DWH is created primarily to analyze data for decision making.  A DWH could be the source of the following aggregated and calculated data: Total Sales (by Location, Category, SKU, Period, and more). For example, all Сustomers from Segment #1 bought 100 000 units of goods from Category #1 brought $1,000,000 in March 2020; Total Sales Growth (by Location, Category, SKU, and more). For example, it increased by 100,000$ or 10% in March 2020 compared with March 2019.  Budget Vs. Actual (by Location, Category, Period, Сustomer Segment, and more). For example, the actual variance is $10,000 or -10%.  and so on. These data can be used to create models, e.g. to predict demand for goods from Category #1 from Сustomers from the Segment #1. The data for the analysis are automatically loaded and precalculated in the DWH so you don’t have to spend financial resources on specialists’ salaries to get analysis-ready information. This also negates the possibility of human error. A data warehouse is different from a database in that it contains aggregated and calculated data for analytical purposes. This is why you can’t do without a DWH if you need analytics for making business decisions. Using BI without DWH you could face such risks as: Business data loss. Risk of incorrect analytics due to business data loss (loss of data due to temporary connection glitch, denial of access to the data during report generation, loss of access to the historical data due to its deletion at the source). Performance issues. Using analytics could be impossible due to the BI-tool freezing, crashing, or becoming unresponsive. Check out other benefits of a data warehouse.
Dmitry Baraishuk • 2 min read

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