Top 3 Reporting Problems Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) Face When Hiring Their First BI Person

Hiring a business intelligence (BI) developer, analyst, or data engineer is often a turning point for skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) or other long-term care organizations looking to become more data-driven. But for many organizations, the initial excitement quickly turns into frustration when the reality of building custom dashboards or SNF business intelligence sets in.

This article outlines the top three problems SNFs face when hiring their first BI professional, framed through the logical journey of building a dashboard: accessing the data, structuring the data, and delivering user-friendly reports. If you're a hiring manager or the person this BI hire will report to, this guide will give you clarity—and maybe save you from months of headache.

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1. Getting Access to the Data: Harder Than You Think

The first and often most difficult challenge your BI hire will face is simply accessing your healthcare data. In long-term care, data is fragmented across multiple systems: EMRs, timeclocks, payroll, HRIS, incident logs, admissions tools, and more.

Some of these platforms offer APIs, but accessing them can require weeks of back-and-forth with the vendor. Others may allow direct healthcare data warehouse access, but that often comes with strict security or technical constraints. And in the worst case scenario, you’ll resort to manual exports—asking your team (or vendors) to regularly upload CSVs or Excel files.

At one or two systems, this is annoying but doable. At ten or more, it becomes a full-time job. And since those manual uploads only reflect a snapshot in time, your dashboards are out of date almost as soon as they’re built. Real-time analytics? Not a chance.

Real-World Example: When one large multi-facility operator hired a Power BI developer, they spent 6 months building data pipelines to 9 systems. When one vendor changed their API format without notice, it broke three critical dashboards overnight.

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2. Structuring the Data: The Sisyphean Task

Once your new hire has access to your SNF data, they face the even more time-consuming task of cleaning and aligning it. Different systems format data in different ways—even simple values like dates or times can be wildly inconsistent (e.g., DD-MM-YYYY vs. MM-DD-YY vs. timestamp).

And because almost every metric in SNF reporting relies on combining data from multiple systems (think HPPD, which needs both timeclock and census data), these inconsistencies create huge bottlenecks.

Now scale that challenge up to 10+ systems, hundreds of variables, and thousands of records. Your BI person isn’t building dashboards—they’re cleaning, merging, and troubleshooting messy datasets week after week.

Cost Breakdown: Hiring a senior BI developer or data engineer with healthcare experience can cost $120K–$160K/year. Add in the time spent structuring data and managing integrations, and you’re quickly looking at the need for a second hire just to maintain momentum.

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3. Building the Dashboard: The Final (and Often Underestimated) Hurdle

Let’s say your new BI hire overcomes the integration and structuring challenges—now it’s time to build the nursing home dashboards. The expectation is: the data’s clean, we’re done, right? Not quite.

Technical folks tend to build technical dashboards. While those may be accurate and comprehensive, they’re often difficult for non-technical users to interpret. That means C-suite leaders, regional directors, and department heads may find them confusing or frustrating.

What follows is a cycle of feedback, revisions, and usability tweaks. Multiply that by different teams across finance, operations, clinical, HR—and you’re looking at a full queue of requests. Congratulations, your BI developer now needs a BI support specialist.

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Honorable Challenge Mentions

• Integrations Change: APIs get updated, platforms change schema, vendors reconfigure fields. If no one’s actively monitoring those changes, your dashboards can (and will) break. Check out Megadata's full integration guide here.
• Regulatory Shifts: State and federal regulations change frequently—especially reimbursement models. Your reporting logic must keep up.
• User Adoption: Even the best dashboards are useless if no one uses them. Training, documentation, and consistent access are key to adoption.
• Security: When dealing with confidential healthcare data, security is a must. Your BI hire will need to navigate the nuances of HIPAA and SOC2 to meet industry standards in healthcare data security.

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What to Look For in a BI Hire:

Here are a few of our recommendations for essential skills and experience for a first-time SNF business intelligence (BI) or data analyst hire:

• Data Integration Experience
  • Proven ability to connect to APIs, FTPs, and direct database sources
  • Experience integrating data from EMRs, HRIS, payroll, timeclock, and clinical systems
  • Familiarity with HIPAA-compliant data handling practices
• ETL / Data Transformation
  • Proficiency in ETL tools (e.g., SQL Server Integration Services, Azure Data Factory, Power Query)
  • Experience transforming inconsistent data (e.g., time formats, missing values, differing schemas)
• Data Modeling
  • Ability to build and maintain normalized, scalable data models
  • Familiarity with healthcare-specific metrics like HPPD, census, PDPM, 30-day rehospitalizations
• BI Tools & Visualization
  • Advanced skills in Power BI (DAX, data modeling, custom visuals, row-level security)
  • Familiarity with Excel, Tableau, or other visualization tools
  • Ability to build dashboards tailored to varying levels of data literacy (from C-suite to facility staff)
• Soft Skills & Collaboration
  • Strong communication skills for gathering requirements and presenting to non-technical users
  • Comfortable working cross-functionally across clinical, operations, finance, and HR teams
• Documentation & Maintenance
  • Ability to document data sources, assumptions, and data dictionary entries
  • Skills in building validation rules and QA checks for ongoing report accuracy
  • Exposure to SNF or long-term care workflows and KPIs
  • Experience responding to regulatory changes or compliance -driven reporting needs
  • Familiarity with building scalable, multi-facility reporting for large enterprises
    

There’s a Smarter, Faster Way

If all of the above sounds overwhelming, that’s because it is. But there’s a simpler alternative.

Megadata offers a fully managed analytics platform purpose-built for post-acute care. We integrate directly with your systems (70+ and counting), handle all the backend plumbing, and deliver real-time dashboards across finance, staffing, census, clinical, billing, PBJ Analytics, and more.

Still want to build your own reports in Power BI? No problem. Our Mega Data Warehouse gives your team real-time access to clean, structured data—so your BI person can focus on building insights instead of wrestling with file formats.

Looking to make your first BI hire a success? Start with a foundation that makes it possible.

Let Megadata help you do it right the first time.

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