Pyramid Analytics enables executives at —one of the largest hospital systems in New Jersey—to access clearer, more dynamic, more strategic ways of visualizing financial and
Based in Paterson, New Jersey, St. Joseph’s Health is a hospital and healthcare system that includes the St. Joseph’s University Medical Center, Children’s Hospital, Wayne Medical Center, and other management units across multiple campuses. The system also includes more than 30 New Jersey community-based facilities. Regularly recognized among the top hospitals in New Jersey, the hospital system provides award-winning healthcare services to the New York Metropolitan Area.
St. Joseph’s has worked with Pyramid Analytics for several years, and their IT and enterprise analytics teams regularly produce some 15 complex dashboards for executive use.
“We realigned data that was once in an email or spreadsheet to create a visual ‘quick hit’ of what was happening that day,” says Christopher Pierznik, Director of Financial Systems and Analytics at St. Joseph’s. “In time, our senior leaders realized they were using tools they only had heard about at other companies.”
When the COVID pandemic hit the United States, St. Joseph’s needed to quickly start monitoring trends in COVID admissions, discharges, and deaths, among other metrics, to track trends and make informed decisions. Using the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform, which speeds up insights and enables faster, more intelligent decisions with any data for any person and any analytics need, St. Joseph’s was able to create one-stop COVID dashboards from multiple sources with relative ease.
Then, the governor of New Jersey enacted an employee-vaccination mandate, requesting that St. Joseph’s meet a 100% threshold of everybody having a completed vaccine series. IT needed to pull data from multiple sources into its reporting system and then into a dashboard environment for leaders to access and report this information easily. The IT department, already well-versed in Pyramid, was able to use the platform’s multi-source direct data access and fast direct-query engine to consolidate the data directly into a single-view dashboard environment for executives to have quick and easy access to this key information, which could then be shared with the government.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also requires St. Joseph’s to submit a daily report to the New Jersey Hospital Association seven days a week. While some states can submit their data directly to HHS, others, including New Jersey, must partner with another intermediary to submit the data. Using Pyramid Analytics, St. Joseph’s director of enterprise analytics developed a script to populate the HHS template directly, pulling in data they receive from various sources throughout the organization.
Around the same time, numerous departments asked for a quality scorecard to see how they performed on pandemic metrics, such as readmissions and mortality — and they wanted it in a familiar format. In addition to needing the capability to review and track against their goals, users wanted the quality scorecard to look like the Excel report they’d used for years.
Using Pyramid, the IT department created a scorecard dashboard that looks exactly like the previous report but provides a host of indicators and quick visuals, as well as the capability for executives to drill down to the patient level so follow-ups could be initiated when necessary.
“Our dashboards are very cutting-edge — even some of our data partners say they’ve never seen anything like them,” says Althea Oenga, Business Intelligence Developer of St. Joseph’s enterprise analytics team. “Our COVID dashboard is very interactive and visually appealing. It allows you to really see your data. That’s kudos to the power of the Pyramid platform.”
The COVID dashboards provided comprehensive information for executives to fully understand how St. Joseph’s was weathering the pandemic at every level. St. Joseph’s was able to quickly scale adoption for the organization because Pyramid is designed to deploy AI-guided self-service experiences, allowing employees to embed insights into their own workflows and see their achievements against organizational goals.
“We made this data-governance decision because we believe in democratizing data,” Oenga adds.
