5 Questions to Ask to Get More Value from Your Data

Domo can do almost anything. There are so many tools your teams may not know where to start or how to keep growing your toolkit. At the fall 2023 Domo Connections Tour in Boston, our partners at Regional One Health, a not-for-profit hospital system in Memphis, Tennessee, shared five tactics for identifying new, creative, and productive ways to get the most from your data—and from Domo.    

1—What data still lives on sticky notes, in text messages, or with certain people? 

You may think all your organization’s data lives in one place already—but the odds are that your people are storing valuable insights all over. Regional One Health had plenty of patient data stored in its electronic medical records—but it turned out that valuable data lived in plenty of other systems, too.  

Reginald Coopwood, MD, CEO of Regional One Health, wanted to empower his leaders to make data-driven decisions about the hospital system’s clinical outcomes, operations, and finances.  

“Before we could do that, we needed to figure out how we were going to be able to tell a full, 360-degree picture of our organization when, let’s be honest, most of our data sets were not data sets,” Jani Radhakrishnan, CEO of Regional One Health Solutions. “They were [sticky] notes. They were emails. They were PDFs. They were pieces of paper laying on people’s desks.” 

If data was in systems, it was in systems built for Internet Explorer and Windows 98. Ask your people to scrape the data in their daily work lives and share these undocumented data points and themes. Places to look include sticky notes and notepads, text messages, the notes app, comments in design tools, and project management software. Gathering this data will help you know what data needs better tracking, storing, and organizing.    

2—What is a manual process that’s been impossible to make more efficient? 

Your organization probably still has some manual processes—even if you have plenty of active Domo users. Your people may not even realize the ways they’ve always worked could be automated. The purpose isn’t to cut their responsibilities; rather, it’s to free them up for the more strategic, creative work that needs their skill sets.  

To find opportunities, try asking your colleagues: 

• In what scenarios is your team texting each other to communicate about the business? 
• What mini-lessons do you find yourself teaching over and over (e.g., how to communicate PTO coverage)?  
• What work have you come to dread? Which tasks feel especially tedious, and why? 

Regional One Health identified that communicating and tracking when “going into diversion”—when a hospital hits capacity and has to send patients to other nearby hospitals—was a manual process that could be automated. They felt that they were “in diversion” a lot, but no one knew exactly how often or why.  

“So, we took all the [sticky] notes—people would literally write down ‘we’re going into diversion’ and walk it down the hallway and put it on someone’s desk. And people would text each other,” said Radhakrishnan. “So we digitized it, literally, by making an Excel spreadsheet—sometimes you have to meet people where they are at.”  

Her team used a shared drive and Domo’s Workbench and then coached people through recording why they were going into diversion. Having that information visible—nothing else—led to a decrease in diversion hours.   

3—When and why did your people lose faith in data? 

It only takes one negative experience to make someone skeptical about and resistant to using data. Choose an employee group and ask them when and why they stopped using data. Did the software take too long to learn? Did they get burned by using inaccurate data? Did they end up with two different numbers for the same metric and give up?

Radhakrishnan says Regional One Health had data skeptics. Some of their providers didn’t trust the data that Radhakrishnan’s team populated in Domo’s dashboards at first. Before Domo, they questioned whether the dashboards represented an accurate picture of their departments. “Now, these same people call me at 7am saying the data from Cerner [our Electronic Medical Record System] didn’t automatically update this morning.”

Turning people from data skeptics to data enthusiasts like these providers may take time. But understanding the roots of any skepticism can help you tailor your implementation and training.    

4—What problems keep happening, despite all your employee training and education?   

For Regional One Health, a recurrent problem was pressure ulcers, a type of “harm event.” They happen when people have long hospital stays and certain preventive practices, such as turning patients over, may not happen as frequently as they should. Radhakrishnan’s team felt mystified that the number of pressure ulcers was not decreasing, even though prevention practices were well-known.  

They created an audit tool that connected the hospital’s electronic medical system with its clinical operations data. This tool tracked if and when a preventive practice (e.g., turning) was missed and indicated if there was a “clinically justifiable reason” (e.g., the patient was in surgery). Clinical leaders suddenly had accurate, real-time data they could use to coach their staff and take corrective action when needed. The result? Harm events drastically decreased.    

5—What problems does your organization have that feel impossible to solve? 

Regional One Health is a public hospital that takes everyone—a noble mission, but one with high costs. To offset these costs, the hospital system always had to get creative with bringing in revenue, which felt impossible. With Domo, they got simple tools for developing new revenue lines.  

Here’s what happened: Regional One has an internal pharmacy—“but we found that lots of people were writing the prescriptions and getting them filled at [retail pharmacies],” said Radhakrishnan. “We wanted to capture the prescriptions coming in because there’s revenue tied to that.” 

The team needed to figure out how to get real-time prescription data: who was writing the prescriptions, to what clinic, to what pharmacy, who’ was running the clinic, who were the physicians? To accomplish this, Radhakrishnan joined their prescription data with their HR management system and built a dashboard in Domo that tracked real-time prescription data by provider and clinic location—fostering some healthy competition. 

The result: They doubled their capture rate in three years (millions of additional revenue!).    

One of Domo’s customers has already built your next powerful use case 

Regional One Health is just one of hundreds of stories of organizations transforming their industries through the power of Domo. We’ve often found that our customers’ next aha! moment comes from hearing a customer story that helps them imagine what else is possible in Domo.  

Check out our customer stories to get inspired and catch us on the Domo Connections Tour. We always host at least one customer speaker and would love for you to join.