Intro: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of DoctorPodcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth (host): On this edition of the SHSMD Podcast, we're talking data, people, as we learn how Children's Nebraska transformed fragmented data into a powerful decision-making engine. Basically, you want to know how to pull all your dashboards together to support strategic planning, improve operational decision-making, and help deliver better care for your patients and families? Well, of course you do. Then, listen to this episode and attend their session at SHSMD Connections 2026.

Joining me are Sergio Orozco, Director of Strategic Planning and Project Management, and Amber Marquiss, Manager Business Intelligence, both from Children's Nebraska. That's coming up on the SHSMD Podcast right now.

This is the SHSMD Podcast: Rapid Insights for Healthcare Strategy Professionals and Planning, Business Development, Marketing Communications, and Public Relations. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth. Sergio and Amber, welcome

Sergio Orozco: Hey, Bill. Thank you for having us.

Amber Marquiss: Great. Thank you for having us.

Host: You bet. Happy to talk with both of you. So Sergio, I'm going to start with you. Your session is called Turning Fragmented Data into a Decision-Making Engine. What was happening at Children's Nebraska that made you realize your existing approach to data wasn't enough anymore?

Sergio Orozco: One of the biggest items that we've noticed at Children's is we have a lot of access to a lot of data. However, we noticed in the last few years that the data that we were working with was sometimes siloed, and it lived in different departments or different siloed systems. Sometimes we had to do a lot of manual work, which caused a lot of delay on data accuracy in allowing us to make decisions.So, we really had to think as an org, how can we turn the data into actionable data that's going to help us with our strategic growth?

Host: You know, Sergio, I think that's a common thing. People have this siloed data, and they don't really talk to each other. So Amber, that brings me to my question to you. So, you brought together claims, scheduling, finance, demographic, and other data into a single enterprise view. What were the biggest challenges, maybe not technically, but organizationally, in getting everyone aligned around, let's call it, one source of truth?

Amber Marquiss: One of our biggest challenges was getting everybody to agree to kind of become data stewards to our organization. Having people who really know the information well and helping us to write the correct KPIs, the correct numerators, the correct denominators, and having kind of groups held accountable for their data and how they want it represented within the organization

Host: Yeah, that sounds like that was a really important cog to this whole thing. Would that be right?

Amber Marquiss: Correct. It is. Data governance has been a big, benefit to us in getting that organized and getting people engaged to help us get the correct answer we want organizationally. And sometimes they are siloed. You might have a department-level metric, but we try to have this as the organization metric that we want people to use.

Host: Well, that seems like a real critical step in all of this. And then,let me ask you, Amber, I know a lot of organizations, they have dashboards, and like Sergio was saying, they're all siloed. But not all of them change behavior, and it sounds like that's what you have accomplished here. Can you share an example of how your Power BI dashboards helped leaders make a better strategic or operational decision?

Amber Marquiss: With the help of the strategic planning group, with having this dashboard built, we're able to quickly answer questions that come up, where historically it would take us a couple weeks to kind of get all the data put together, munge it into the right look and feel. And with the dashboards, having the data right at your fingertips with the ability to change your graphing, change what you're pulling in, changing the different KPIs very quickly within the dashboard, it has made it so that we can get answers to leadership very quickly, and it has changed how we can respond to questions where before people would have to wait. Now, we can get that immediately out to them, helping us drive the business quicker.

Host: That speed is really important. In any business, the faster you can come to conclusions or decisions or understand data, really important. So, by putting all these dashboards together, it sounds like you really sped things up when you needed to find information. Is that right?

Amber Marquiss: Correct. And it's allowing for more self-service too as well, with having that ability to go in and get your answers quickly without having to wait and put in a help desk ticket, wait for your data to come back to you. That self-service has been a huge win for us.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. That is really important. And Sergio, I know one of your learning objectives focuses on collaboration and governance, and Amber was talking about governance. What did you do to standardize definitions, workflows, and reporting so people actually trusted the data?

Sergio Orozco: I want to elaborate a little bit that not only is data a consolidation of data, it's not just a technical component of this. The biggest item is, like, how do we find an organizational alignment? So, we kind of use three goals as we were coming up with our data excellence. How do we focus on having data literacy and definitions that we all agree between departments? How do we agree on having data quality? And then, to Amber's point, how do we create those data uses where we're using data in a way that is scalable, easy for people to use? We also have a unifying method when we onboard a new team member. We have them go through a Power BI 101 where they kind of understand the high level, how to use it, how to function it.

One of the things that I really like about our partnership and collaboration with strategic planning and our data governance team and our data analytics is the ability to create dashboards that are meaningful, where you're able to drill down what the function that you're looking at. If you're going to look at it from an enterprise level or a service line or specific division, down to maybe that provider KPI or growth opportunity.

Host: So, I like those three. You said data literacy, data quality, and data usage. And then, you said to make sure it's scalable, easy. And then, I like that onboarding process where you talk about a unifying method as well. And I know you're going to go into detail in all of these things in your session, which I think is going to be great.

And then, Amber, for healthcare marketers and strategy leaders listening who feel like their own data is scattered across multiple systems, which is a common thing, we know this. So, tell us, in your opinion, what's the first step they should take to begin building a more unified, actionable data strategy?

Amber Marquiss: We took the approach of we were going to create a data warehouse. And our reasoning behind that is it allows us to be able to do link servers, so that we can link multiple different databases and different servers together to pull data. We have a lot of external sources, so we are working with different areas. So, having somebody who knows how to do API connections, having somebody who knows how to do like an SSIS package to ingest potentially flat files. You need to create a team that can do the data munging for you, because there's a lot of that that has to happen in the background.

I do believe having a unified data warehouse where you start to pull all of those things into one area has been one of our biggest successes in how we've been able to, quickly turn data around and have it at people's fingertips. So, I do think having a data warehouse strategy is probably very important. And then, again, data governance and data stewards. having those three pieces kind of combined together has been a huge lift for our organization.

Sergio Orozco: I want to add a little bit more to Amber's point. The biggest impact that we have noticed with our collaboration is now that we have created this data warehouse, we're not only able to make faster decisions, but it also allows us to remove all of the manual reporting that we were previously doing. But it also allowed us to have data accuracy, so that way we can improve alignment between leadership teams.

So now, when different leaders asking us to provide us with a certain metric, we all collectively agree if we're trying to answer how many patients did this clinic saw, we all are able to provide with the same number of answer in finance, strategy, data analytics. We're now providing the same number instead of having different numbers based on our own interpretation of the data or how we siloed had it before.

Host: Sergio, thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, removing the manual labor, that'scertainly got to speed things up. and you said it also improves accuracy, which is a huge benefit as well. This has been a great interview. I want to thank you both of you for your time. I would like to ask each of you one last question, same question to get each of your viewpoints on this.

Sergio, let me start with you. As analytics and AI continue to evolve, how do you see real-time data shaping strategic planning in pediatric care over the next few years? And what should organizations be doing now to prepare?

Sergio Orozco: One of the items that we're hoping to get as we evolve with this is go from reactive reporting to proactive intelligence. And now that we are able to break down our silo teams, we're also able to create accountability and shared accountability. As you know, with the integration of AI and tools, I'm hoping that in the near future we can really focus on AI-enabled insights such as forecasting growth opportunities, also the ability to analyze data in a more meaningful way, and also be able to create real-time analytics that is hopefully going to help us improve the quality of care for our patients. And we're able to see trends based on population trends that we've seen for our community.

Host: Yeah, tying all those together, that'd be really, really important. And when anytime you talk about growth opportunities, I know people are going to listen for sure. Amber, let me ask you the same question. As analytics and AI continue to evolve, where do you see us going in the next few years, and what should organizations be doing now to prepare?

Amber Marquiss: I feel like organizations really need to focus on data and getting their data ready for AI. Because AI can do a lot of things, but if your data is not well-structured, you're going to get false positives, errors in your information. And so, I feel like organizations are really going to have to start focusing on having clean data to help make sure they're getting the right answers for AI.

As you use AI, you'll see sometimes you get great answers, sometimes it's not so great. So, I feel like having clean data that is ready for predictive analytics and moving into that more prescriptive, and risk analysis kind of levels, you're going to need to have clean data to do that accurately.

Host: So focus on data, make sure it's well-structured and clean. So, I think that's great. Well, this is going to be a dynamite session, you guys. I know a lot of people are going to come to this. I know you're going to go into this way more in depth than this quick interview. But thank you so much for sharing some of this information with us today. We really appreciate it.

Sergio Orozco: It's a pleasure talking to you, Bill.

Amber Marquiss: Thank you for your time.

Host: You bet. Once again, that is Sergio Orozco and Amber Marquiss. And for more information and to dive deeper into strategies like the ones we were just talking about, make sure you register for SHSMD Connections. Just go to shsmd.org/education/annualconference to learn more and to get registered and, of course, to connect with healthcare marketing and strategy leaders from across the country.

And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels, and please hit the subscribe or follow button to get every episode. And to access our full podcast library or other topics of interest to you, visit shsmd.org/podcasts. This has been a production of Doctor Podcasting. I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya!