Introducing the Analytics Center of Excellence in the Yale School of Medicine

The Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) is a unit established in 2021 within the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) branch of Health Science Information Services. ACE consists of five core staff who support data-driven decision-making at Yale School of Medicine across the administrative, education, research, and clinical missions. ACE develops data capabilities that complement native reporting from Workday and core applications, integrating data to support complex decisions and insights.

Please visit the medicine.yale.edu/analytics website and select Concierge to submit a question about data resources available within YSM or a new request. Below are examples of current ACE initiatives.

Team successes

Data Platform: ACE is deploying new, secure Microsoft data infrastructure to enable integrated data services for YSM administrators and faculty leadership.

• The platform will run Microsoft data management and analytics programs such as SQL Server, Power BI, and SQL Server Analysis Services.
• Raw data inputs will be hosted and transformed into business-relevant reporting layers. Data marts will be developed to provide insights that are difficult to obtain from the source systems alone.

Faculty Lifecycle: The Faculty Lifecycle Analytics Data Mart is the first data domain to be developed. Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Academic (faculty appointments module of Workday) data will be refreshed daily. 

A new version of YSM Academic Analytics’ Quarterly Human Resource Report Suite will be the first YSM dashboard, containing key demographic metrics and trends by faculty rank, track, and department.

Future domains will feature information about:

• Faculty recruiting/Request for Faculty Position
• Search process metrics, and
•  Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) benchmark references.

Education Analytics for Continuous Quality Improvement and Reaccreditation: YSM is preparing for reaccreditation in late 2023. ACE has participated in the discovery of key data and benchmarks for medical education, which will be summarized into a data catalog of data sources, points of contact, and update schedules to support timely analysis of medical education processes.

ACE has loaded history and benchmarking data sets from the Association of American Medical Colleges to prepare visualizations of YSM student feedback on a wide array of questions compared to national percentiles.

The Education Analytics Data Mart supports inquiries about:

• Graduation Questionnaires
• Y2Q (second year student questionnaires)
• Residency transitions

Meet the ACE team

Maureen Velazquez - IT Manager for Analytics
Maureen leads the ACE team and develops data strategies to support YSM leadership priorities. Prior to ACE, she was the Manager for Data Governance in ITS Enterprise Reporting and Analytics. While in ITS, she supported the creation of new data marts for Finance, Research Administration, and Student Space.

Todd McKeown – Senior Business Systems Analyst
Todd leverages Microsoft Power BI, SQL, and SharePoint skills to understand user requirements and develop reports or other technical solutions. Prior to ACE, Todd was a report lead for the COVID Analytics team from June 2020 – July 2021.

April Rowe - Reporting Analyst
April’s expertise is operational dashboards and data solutions within the health sciences. April came to ACE from the Yale Medicine CARE Center team. Prior to that, she worked for Yale New Haven Hospital on data warehouse support and analytics.

Jon Serena – Data Architect 
Jon is a newly certified Data Vault Architect who oversees data integration and management, including for the ACE data mart. Jon previously worked for Yale ITS as Lead Database Administrator.

Ralph Zampano – Project Manager for Analytics
Ralph keeps the ACE team and stakeholders organized and on track. He came to ACE from the Yale COVID Analytics program, where he was a relationship manager from July 2020- December 2021. Prior to Yale, Ralph delivered custom analytics solutions for financial and insurance organizations.