Business Intelligence Data Platform, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services

Responses by Corey Mercy, deputy chief technology officer at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services

What’s your project?

The business intelligence data platform is a location to bring multiple sources of data from systems both internal to DHHS and external, and bring those data into a common platform where they can be analyzed, looked at, brought together to inform and deliver information that is key to our business operations, whether that’s supporting the pandemic or supporting other areas of health and human services that we offer.

Can you speak to some of the feedback that demonstrated the project’s impact?

One of the initial impacts was around our collection and dissemination of information regarding bed availability across hospitals within the state of North Carolina. Prior to us implementing the BI data platform, a lot of that work was being done manually by a team that was spending two to four hours a day manually putting this information together and reporting that out, seven days a week. When we implemented the BI data platform, we provided an automated mechanism to consolidate and collect all those data. Then our data team was able to develop an automated dashboard to then report that out. We went from our manual reporting mechanism to an automated solution has saved probably 700 to 1,000 hours of someone’s manual labor, as well as just their quality of life.

What’s something you’d like to do to improve or expand your project?

While the platform has been very instrumental in as a tool in our work with the pandemic, the vision was for this to be a much broader tool, servicing all areas of the 30-plus divisions and offices of DHHS, as well as our external partners and being able to bring together those disparate sources of data to help provide rich repositories where data scientists and analysts to dig into and understand the data.