27 February 2026 · 12 min read · Arviteni
Most care groups have data trapped in silos across care management, HR, payroll, and compliance systems. This guide explains what business intelligence looks like in a care setting, the questions it can answer, and how to get started with Power BI without needing a data team.
You have the data. It is sitting in your care management platform, your HR system, your payroll software, your compliance spreadsheets, and half a dozen SharePoint folders. The problem is not that the data does not exist. The problem is that you cannot see it.
Every month, the same thing happens. Regional managers pull numbers from one system, cross-reference them against another, copy them into a spreadsheet, format them into a slide deck, and present them to the board. The process takes days. By the time the board sees the figures, they are describing your organisation as it was four to six weeks ago. If occupancy dipped, if agency spend spiked, if incident rates crept up in a particular region, the window to intervene early has already closed.
This is the reality for most mid-sized care groups. Not a shortage of data, but a complete inability to see it in one place, in real time, in a way that supports better decisions. That is what business intelligence solves.
When most people hear "business intelligence" or "BI," they picture corporate dashboards covered in graphs that nobody really uses. That is not what we are talking about here.
In a care setting, business intelligence means connecting the systems you already use so that the people making decisions can see what is actually happening across your organisation, right now, without waiting for someone to compile a report manually.
It is not about building something that looks impressive in a board meeting. It is about answering the questions that matter: Where are we struggling? Where are we improving? What needs attention before it becomes a problem?
The tool that makes this practical for most care organisations is Microsoft Power BI. If your organisation already runs Microsoft 365, you may already have access to Power BI through your existing licensing. It connects to the systems you use, pulls data together into a single view, and updates automatically.
It is not the only option, but it is the one that works best for care providers who do not have a dedicated data team and do not want to invest in enterprise analytics platforms.
The value of business intelligence is not in the dashboards themselves. It is in the questions you can suddenly answer that were previously impossible, or at least impractical, to investigate.
This is one of the most revealing correlations in care. When a home relies heavily on agency staff, care quality often suffers. Agency workers do not know the residents as well, they are less familiar with care plans, and communication gaps increase. If your BI dashboard shows that homes with the highest agency spend also have elevated incident rates, you have evidence to support a targeted recruitment and retention strategy rather than a blanket initiative.
Without BI, you would need someone to manually extract agency costs from payroll, incidents from the care management platform, and cross-reference them in a spreadsheet. With BI, the correlation is visible immediately.
Turnover in care is a persistent challenge, but it is rarely uniform across an organisation. Some homes retain staff well. Others are constantly recruiting. If you can see turnover rates alongside training completion, vacancy duration, and manager tenure, patterns emerge.
Perhaps the homes with the highest turnover also have the longest time to fill vacancies, meaning remaining staff are under constant pressure. Perhaps training compliance is lowest where turnover is highest, creating a cycle where new staff are under-supported and leave quickly.
Compliance training is a regulatory requirement, and most care organisations track it. But tracking it in a spreadsheet per home is very different from seeing a real-time map of compliance across your entire organisation.
BI lets you see which regions are falling behind on mandatory training. More usefully, it lets you drill into why. Is it a capacity issue? A management issue? Is it correlated with high vacancy rates where new starters have not yet completed induction?
Occupancy drives revenue. Staffing drives cost. The relationship between the two determines whether a home is operationally sustainable. If occupancy is declining but staffing levels remain static, your cost per occupied bed is rising. If occupancy is increasing but staffing has not kept pace, care quality may be at risk.
Seeing these two data points together, updated automatically, gives operations directors the visibility they need to make staffing decisions based on evidence rather than instinct.
One of the most common misconceptions about BI is that you need to collect new data. You almost certainly do not. The data already exists across your operational systems.
Care management platform. Whether you use Person Centred Software, Nourish, Log my Care, or another system, this is where your care delivery data lives: occupancy, incidents, safeguarding referrals, care plan reviews, medication errors, and more.
HR system. BambooHR, Staffology, or whichever people management platform your organisation runs. This holds headcount, vacancies, turnover rates, sickness absence, and employee demographics.
Payroll. Your payroll system, or the automated timesheet data flowing into it, contains agency spend, overtime, and cost data that is essential for financial analysis.
Finance. Your accounting system holds revenue, costs, budgets, and margins at the home and regional level.
SharePoint and compliance records. Training records, policy review dates, audit outcomes, and compliance checklists often live in SharePoint lists or shared spreadsheets.
The challenge is not generating data. It is that each of these systems was designed to serve a specific function, and none of them was designed to talk to the others. BI bridges that gap.
You do not need a data team to start using Power BI. You do need a clear idea of what you want to see first and a willingness to start small.
The best first dashboard is the one that replaces your most painful manual reporting process. For most care groups, that is the monthly board report: occupancy, financial performance, workforce metrics, and compliance status.
If your finance director currently spends two days compiling those numbers from multiple sources, that is your starting point. Build a dashboard that answers the same questions the board already asks, but updates automatically instead of requiring manual assembly.
Power BI connects directly to many common business systems through built-in connectors. For systems without a direct connector, data can be exported to Excel or CSV files stored in a SharePoint folder, which Power BI reads automatically on a schedule.
The key is to avoid trying to connect everything at once. Start with two or three data sources that answer your most pressing questions. Add more as you learn what is useful and what is noise.
One of the biggest advantages of Power BI is automated data refresh. Once configured, your dashboards update themselves on a schedule, typically daily. The board opens the dashboard and sees current data without anyone lifting a finger.
For sources that require manual export, you can often automate the extraction using Power Automate (included in most Microsoft 365 licences) to create a fully hands-off pipeline.
The difference between a dashboard that refreshes automatically and one that requires someone to update a spreadsheet every week is the difference between a tool people actually use and one that gets abandoned within three months.
This is where many organisations hesitate, and it is actually one of the most important features to configure correctly. Row-level security means that when a registered manager opens the dashboard, they see data for their home. When a regional manager opens the same dashboard, they see data for their region. When the operations director opens it, they see everything.
One dashboard, one data model, one set of reports, but each person sees only what is relevant to their role. For care organisations handling sensitive workforce and care data, this is a governance requirement, not just a convenience.
Not everyone needs to see the same information. One of the mistakes organisations make with BI is building a single dashboard and expecting it to serve everyone from board members to department heads. Different audiences need different views, different levels of detail, and different refresh frequencies.
Board and senior leadership. High-level organisational performance: occupancy trends, financial summary, workforce stability, compliance status, and quality indicators. This audience wants to see the overall picture and identify areas that need strategic attention. Monthly or fortnightly review is typical.
Regional managers. Comparative views across the homes in their region, highlighting outliers and trends. Which home has rising agency costs? Where is occupancy declining? Which homes are ahead or behind on training compliance? Regional managers need to spot problems early and allocate support where it is needed. Weekly review works well here.
Registered managers. Detailed views of their individual home's performance with the ability to drill into specifics. A registered manager wants to see their own metrics, understand their trends, and compare themselves to peers (not as a judgement, but as a learning tool). If another home in the group has significantly better falls prevention outcomes, they want to understand what is different.
Department heads. Functional dashboards tailored to their area. HR sees vacancy rates, time to hire, and turnover by role. Finance sees cost per occupied bed, agency spend as a percentage of total staffing cost, and budget variance. Compliance sees training completion rates and audit readiness. Each department head needs depth in their area rather than breadth across the organisation.
Having built care-sector BI dashboards for care organisations, we have seen the same mistakes repeated across the sector. Avoiding them will save you months of frustration.
The temptation is to build a single dashboard that connects every system in your organisation. Do not do this. Start with two or three data sources. Get those working reliably. Let people use them. Then add more.
Every new data source adds complexity, increases the chance of refresh failures, and makes the dashboard harder to maintain. The organisations that succeed with BI start small, prove the value, and expand deliberately.
If you build a beautiful dashboard that answers questions nobody is asking, it will not be used. Before building anything, talk to the people who will use it. What do they need to know? What decisions do they make?
The best BI projects start with a conversation, not a data model. When the dashboard answers a question someone genuinely needs answered, adoption takes care of itself.
A dashboard with 40 charts on a single page is not a dashboard. It is a spreadsheet with colours. Each view should focus on a small number of key metrics with the ability to drill into detail where needed. If someone opens your dashboard and does not know where to look first, it needs simplifying.
BI does not fix bad data. If your care management platform has inconsistent data entry, your BI dashboard will faithfully display that inconsistency. If staff are not recording incidents consistently across homes, a dashboard comparing incident rates between homes will be misleading.
Before investing in dashboards, invest in data quality. Standardise how data is entered. Train staff on why accuracy matters. Use validation rules where your systems support them. Clean data in, useful insight out.
Business intelligence for care providers is not about technology. It is about visibility.
The care sector generates enormous volumes of data every day. Most of it sits in systems that were never designed to work together. The people responsible for care quality, operational sustainability, and workforce planning are making decisions based on incomplete information that is weeks out of date.
BI changes that. When a regional manager can see that agency spend in one home has been climbing for three consecutive months, they can intervene before it becomes a budget crisis. When the operations director can see that training compliance correlates with staff retention, they can make a case for investing in learning and development. When the board can see current performance data instead of a retrospective slide deck, strategic decisions are grounded in evidence.
You do not need a data team. You do not need enterprise software. You need the data you already have, connected through a tool like Power BI, presented to the people who can act on it.
If your care organisation is ready to move from monthly manual reports to real-time operational visibility, our technology consulting team works with care providers to design, build, and maintain Power BI dashboards that answer the questions that actually matter. We understand care-sector data, care-sector systems, and the operational realities of running a multi-site care group.
Your data is already telling a story. Business intelligence lets you read it.