Imagine you live in a small town with just one restaurant. It’s the only place to eat—and the only one legally allowed to serve food. Whether you want a quick snack or a five-course meal, you must wait in the same line with everyone else, regardless of your need or urgency.
Sound absurd?
It’s exactly how many healthcare organizations structure their business intelligence teams.
Note: The storyboard images referenced in this post illustrate how traditional healthcare BI operates like a single restaurant trying to serve the entire organization. These visuals will be presented in our upcoming workshop to help teams identify and address their specific bottlenecks.
The “Only Restaurant in Town” Problem
In this common setup, central BI acts as the single restaurant for analytics. Everyone—from clinical leaders to finance executives—must line up for custom reports. While centralization was designed to ensure control and consistency, it creates an overwhelming demand-to-capacity imbalance.
BI teams receive ambiguous, shifting requests like: “I need a report on readmissions.” Then partway through, it changes to: “Make it by service line, exclude observation patients, and compare it to last year.”
Each request is custom-built from scratch. Analysts often source data directly from raw systems rather than from curated models or warehouses. This slows down delivery and leads to inconsistencies.
Why Adding More Cooks Isn’t the Answer
The reflex solution is to hire more analysts. But simply growing the team doesn't fix the real problem. Even with more people:
You’re still bottlenecked at a single point of service.
Each “meal” is still made from scratch.
Analysts still need to gather and prep raw data.
More staff increases coordination overhead.
Without addressing the structural issues, hiring more people just adds complexity, not efficiency.
How to Reimagine Your BI Operation
Healthcare organizations need to move from a restaurant model to a food court—one that meets users where they are, at the speed they need, with the right level of service.
1. Build a Food Court, Not a Single Restaurant
Instead of forcing everyone through one analytics pipeline, create a tiered model:
Self-service stations for trained users to generate standard reports.
Quick-serve counters for common, predefined KPIs.
Full-service restaurants for strategic, complex analytics needs.
This approach distributes the workload based on need and complexity.
2. Standardize the Menu
Avoid reinventing the wheel every time a report is requested. Create a standard menu:
Offer prebuilt dashboards and reports for common use cases.
Allow customization within defined guardrails.
Document data definitions and assumptions clearly.
This keeps the process efficient while still offering flexibility.
3. Stock the Pantry
Don’t make analysts source and prep raw data every time. Build reusable infrastructure:
Create robust data models for key healthcare metrics.
Pre-process frequently used combinations of data.
Document metric logic and lineage.
Provide “recipe cards” for how reports and calculations are constructed.
This accelerates delivery by minimizing repeated groundwork.
4. Implement a Restaurant Guide (Unified Discovery)
If users have multiple report options, they need help finding what exists:
Build a searchable analytics catalog.
Include screenshots, descriptions, and usage data.
Let users leave feedback and see related reports.
Use recommendation engines to guide them to relevant content.
Discovery tools reduce duplicate requests and improve user satisfaction.
From Bottleneck to Breakthrough
The “restaurant” metaphor is more than just clever—it’s actionable. With the iScale methodology, healthcare BI leaders can:
Implement distributed delivery models.
Standardize analytics assets.
Build centralized, reusable data structures.
Empower self-service in a governed way.
Access our BI Acceleration Workshop to learn how to apply these principles in your organization. We walk through the “restaurant model” live, explore real examples, and show you how to create a scalable, sustainable analytics supply chain.
Simply fill out the form below to receive the recording and slide deck.