Feature Overview: Data Exploration

What is Data Exploration?

Data exploration is a powerful reporting tool within Alayacare. Drill down into the numbers around your services, visits, invoices, and much more. In the data exploration tab, you can create reports to look at the data from different perspectives, and apply sophisticated filtering to further refine your results. In addition to studying the data in spreadsheet form, you can convert it to various graphs for presentation purposes. Both spreadsheets and graphs are exportable.

In addition to crunching numbers, You can also use data exploration to export information entered in specific text fields across multiple clients, employees, etc., to compare and contrast data. Note though that data exploration is not fully designed to report on free form text fields, so not all of them are available in DE. Consult the documentation or contact support for more information. 

The Data Warehouse

Data Exploration retrieves data from a data warehouse. This warehouse is a copy of the database that operates the software (the source database). A backup of this source database for production environments is made around midnight in your region and then restored to the data warehouse early the next morning. 

For production environments, Data Exploration is restored daily at 8 am EST (CAN/USA region) and 8 am AEST (AUS region). 

In UAT environments, Data Exploration is restored weekly on Sundays. The process is completed at 2 pm EST.

The Release Cycle

Data Exploration has its own release cycle every three weeks. Apart from technical improvements, the release may contain new fields and measures which can be used in your reports.

If you have a request for a field or measure which would help your reporting, please contact the Support team with your needs.

Feature flag & permissions

To use Data Exploration, it must be made available at the system level, and your role must have the appropriate permissions. Permissions for Data Exploration can only be enabled for Admin Portal Roles.

In Settings>All Settings>Features, make sure the flag Data Exploration is ON.

 The following ACLs in the Data Exploration folder control access to Data Exploration:

• Access Data Exploration Module: visibility of the Data Exploration tab.
• Create/Edit Data Exploration Agency Reports: create and edit reports for any cubes the user have access to (see ACLs for individual cubes below).
• Schedule Exports for Reports in Data Exploration: use the Schedule Export feature.
• Access Data Exploration Cube: X: there is one ACL per cube granting access to each in turn.

Viewing Data Exploration

Navigate to Dashboard>Data Exploration.

 

Creating and accessing folders and reports for different report types

You can create reports and organize them into folders to be either private to you or accessible to all DE users in your agency. Additionally, there is a collection of pre-configured reports which we make available to all our tenants.

Learn more:

• Reports and Folders in: Agency Reports, My Reports, Alayacare Reports

Understanding the Structure of Data Exploration (Cubes, Fields, and Measures)

Understanding how Data Exploration is organized is key to making informed decisions when building Reports.

Learn more:

• Understanding the Structure of Data Exploration (Cubes, Dimensions, and Measures)

Building a report

The first step to building a report is knowing precisely what question you want to answer.

For example, how many clients have been discharged in the last 6 months and for what reasons?

Once you have chosen your question, see the descriptions of the different cubes and see which has the information necessary to answer your question.

Now you are ready to open Data Exploration and start building your report.

Learn more:

• DE: Building a Report

Scheduling reports

From any Data Exploration Report, you can program a scheduled export, which will generate a report automatically based on the frequency you set.

• How do I schedule/unschedule/view a recurrent export of a Data Exploration report?

Exporting Reports

Export your reports in Excel, PDF, or csv.

Learn more: 

• How do I export a Data Exploration Report?

Using the dashboard widget

Any Data Exploration Report you create can be embedded in your Dashboard in Graph form as a Widget, so the latest values are immediately visible to you upon login.

Learn more:

• How do I configure my Dashboard?

Data Exploration 2.0

Some of our tenants may have already migrated to Data Exploration 2.0 (DE 2.0). The original version Data Exploration module runs on the embedded Hitachi product Pentaho Business Analytics (PBA). In DE 2.0, Looker is replacing Pentaho as the business intelligence tool embedded in AlayaCare. For more information on DE 2.0, please review this article.