CASE STUDY:

American Medical Informatics Association

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is the professional home of leading informaticians: clinicians, scientists, researchers, educators, and other informatics professionals who rely on data to connect people, information, and technology.

The Problem

Over recent years, AMIA increasingly embraced a strategy of making data-driven decisions. But this strategy often fell into conflict with the realities of resource constraints and their self-proclaimed “dirty data.”

The Solution

AMIA needed flexible, scalable, elegant solutions and they found them by using Nucleus and Power BI together. AMIA was able to use hard data to gain insights into member behaviors.

Pathway to success

Karen Greenwood, EVP and COO at AMIA, provides an overview of the data analytics challenge and solution at her organization:

AMIA was wrestling with the following set of challenges:

  • AMIA doesn’t have data scientists on staff to write queries needed to take a deeper dive into the data.
  • AMIA’s Board craved frequent access to data, which AMIA staff didn’t have an easy mechanism to provide.
  • Staff devoted burdensome numbers of hours to create Board-friendly reports in Excel, and—even then– AMIA staff often didn’t trust the results of their work.
  • The Board wanted a better understanding of the member demographics and behavior of members, and AMIA didn’t have the in-house skill set to readily answer these questions.

So AMIA approached Nucleus to assist in answering a set of 16 specific questions about various key performance indicators (KPIs) that would address these challenges and help them—and their board—provide the data to help chart the course of the organization.

The staff at AMIA and Nucleus worked together to define the queries that would address AMIA’s 16 key questions and built them out in Power BI and Nucleus.

Through their engagement with Gravitate, AMIA has seen the following take shape:

  • Less manual manipulation of the data means staff is freed up to take a deeper dive into what the numbers mean for successes and challenges in their current programs.
  • The Board has on-demand access to high-level visualizations profiling the health of the organization, without the staff burden of creating time-intensive manual reports.
  • The Power BI queries created during the engagement have surfaced multiple “ah-ha” moments related to member trends and activities.

Life with Nucleus

“Nucleus collects data that resides in our association management system, community platform and marketing system and analyzes it in one place. Without the ability to look at all the data, we were missing trends and overall community behavior. We chose to use two different reporting tools—one much more management focused for internal staff (Nucleus’ built-in visualizations), and the other for the board to see progress on our key performance indicators (Power BI) so we could keep everyone apprised of the most recent data at the appropriate strategic level.”

“We received a 10% boost in membership renewal rates just by reaching out with targeted marketing campaigns to lists that Nucleus helped us segment.”

-Karen Greenwood, AMIA