Stanley Healthcare visualizes the patient experience


We looked at other tools… Tableau came out clearly ahead of the others. There wasn't a lot of debate about if it was the right one for us to go with.

Stanley Healthcare uses sensor technology to help its healthcare customers track and manage important assets and to assure patient security and safety. In video 1, Lauran Hazan, Director of Software Product Management, talks about the decision to integrate Tableau Software into their offering and how they’re finding the experience of partnering with Tableau. In video 2, Lauran shares an example of how a healthcare organization can improve the patient experience with insight from Tableau and Stanley Healthcare.


Tableau: How would you describe your experience onboarding and working with Tableau? Lauren Hazan, Director of Software Product Management: Working with Tableau has been fantastic. Our partner manager, they listen to us. We have access to whatever experts we need at Tableau. And they've been very responsive and helpful. The community around Tableau, both from a technical perspective and a user perspective, it's such a strong and knowledgeable, and sharing type of a community. We've had a great time working with Tableau and gotten great support. And the thing that is so powerful about it is the fact that you don't have to be a scientist or programmer, or someone with highly specialized training that takes years in order to use this product. Tableau: How is Tableau used in your organization as a whole? Lauren: Our integration is at the Tableau Server level. So our developers—and product people as well—will use Tableau Desktop to create the vizzes themselves. But then how the integration works is our product fetches them from Server, and either shows them in our product, or actually we have some hospitals that are just looking at Tableau Server. Aside from the fact that it's a great product and it's been something that has really solved problems for us… We have all this great data and it's cheaper to collect it—by orders of magnitude—with our system than it is to do it manually or any other way. And so now having it be visualized is just so powerful for us. We've branded our analytics offering as Mobile View Analytics. But, everybody knows it's Tableau. We don't make any effort to hide that whatsoever. We're very proud of this partnership. Tableau: How did Tableau stack up compared to other solutions your organization was considering? Lauren: So of course we looked at other tools. Our culture in our R&D and in product organization is absolutely “measure a few times and cut once.” So we had a formal process where we evaluated—I think we started off with six different products. Very, very quickly that went down to three and then there was sort of a final pilot where we evaluated on… I want to say 24 different criteria of all kinds of different things, performance, robustness of API, support capabilities, cost—standard types of things. Tableau came out clearly ahead of the others. There wasn't a lot of debate about if it was the right one for us to go with.

Tableau: What has the introduction of Tableau enabled your team to do through analytics? Lauren: Doctors and nurses by definition have to have a very good understanding of data analysis techniques and statistics and all that stuff, because that's their world that they work in. Primarily what we're using with Tableau is our RTLS platform. RTLS is real time location system in hospitals. So we have active RFID tags. I think one of the great things about being able to have the RTLS data combined with the visual capabilities of Tableau is that in clinical settings data resonates with people. They get it. This is what's actually happening and let's drill into it and look at it and see where the opportunities are for improvement. In my opinion right now the most exciting thing that we're doing with our Tableau integration—think of a scenario where you're a patient in, say, an operating room or a clinic, and they put a tag on you. So we want to create a situation where we're using Tableau to leverage the data from your tag that's telling me, “Okay, how long are you spending in the waiting room? How long are you in prep before the physician comes there? How long is a procedure taking?” And then the hospital has this great visual patient experience where the can start saying, “Okay, how much variability is there? Are our wait time targets in line with what we can achieve? Where might we have staffing issues in helping hospitals really create the kind of patient experience that they want to create?” What we want to do then is create a visual patient experience. You're with a hospital and they're looking at their own data, it's really helping understand their problems. And it's less of us presenting to them, it's more the data presenting to them. Their goal is just to help patients get the treatment that they need and to help them have a great experience, or at least the least unpleasant experience possible as they're going through this treatment for whatever it is. And that's great. It's a privilege to work with these people, for sure. Tableau: That’s amazing! When you think about the visualizations—or vizzes—that you have created for customers, what is your favorite? Lauren: So we have a viz that really shows graphically and visually each phase of care, and what happens and how long it takes. And so to me that is just such a powerful tool for a hospital to see. Okay, this is the situation; this is what it looks like. And when we intervene to impact any of these phases of care, you know, how effective we are. That's the one that I really get the most excited about.