Why We Start with a Conversation for Every VBC Project
In value-based care, data is everywhere, but real insight starts with real understanding.
At Valuable Insight, we don’t begin projects by building dashboards or crunching numbers. We start with a conversation.
A conversation, with the people who actually need to use the data.
Because the “problem” is rarely what it seems
When we’re brought in to build analytics tools for a new program, the request usually sounds simple:
“We need a report for our care coordination team.”
“We need to track high-risk patient engagement.”
“We need to show outcomes.”
But behind every one of these asks are layers of workflow, data habits, and operational nuance that don’t show up in raw files or meeting notes. That’s why we take time to talk to the people behind the program, not just leaders, but end users.
What we want to understand
We approach every new project the way a product team would approach software development: with discovery first.
We ask questions like:
What’s your team actually trying to solve?
What does your day-to-day workflow look like?
What are you tracking manually right now?
What data are you entering and where?
For example, in one care coordination program, we sat down with multiple team members to walk through exactly how they work. We learned:
Outreach attempts were logged under one location
Clinical coordination was documented in another location
Internal notes lived in completely separate tabs
Without those conversations, we would have pulled the wrong backend tables, leading to a report that looked clean but was directionally misleading.
We don’t assume. We ask.
One of the easiest ways to derail a reporting project is to make assumptions, about the data, about the workflow, or about what matters most to the team.
That’s why we run two parallel discovery tracks at the beginning of every engagement:
End User Discovery: Talking to the teams who live in the workflow, understanding how they document, what challenges they face, and what information actually helps them.
Data Discovery: Meeting with IT or analytics teams to understand what data exists, where it lives, how clean it is, and how it’s currently used.
Only after both of these conversations do we define metrics, prioritize features, and move into build mode.
The result: a solution that’s aligned with how people work and what’s technically feasible, not just what sounds good in a meeting.
From conversation to clarity
And we don’t stop at delivery. Once a report is ready, we build user guides tailored to the audience, not just documentation, but explanations of why a metric matters, how it’s calculated, and how to act on it.
Because analytics shouldn’t just look good, it should help people do their jobs better.
In VBC, the real challenge isn’t the data, it’s understanding the people and the workflows behind it.
That’s why we start with conversations, not configurations.
We ask first, build second.
Because the best analytics don’t come from assumptions, they come from understanding.
