NorviTech / Consulting
Discern Analytics 2.0 consulting
DA2 reporting for behavioral health and post-acute care on Oracle Health’s Continuum and CommunityWorks domains, and DA2 data moved into Google, Azure or your own data warehouse.
I spent four years at Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, building post-acute and value-based care analytics: more than two hundred and fifty revenue cycle reports, and the DA2 training that client teams learned from. I now take on independent Discern Analytics 2.0 work, above all for behavioral health and post-acute organisations on the Continuum and CommunityWorks domains, and for teams that want their DA2 data in a warehouse they control.
Where I specialise
Behavioral health
Reporting for behavioral health and substance use programmes, where lengths of stay run long, levels of care change mid-stay, and some records carry stricter disclosure rules than HIPAA alone. At Oracle Health, behavioral health was part of my client base.
The Continuum domain
Oracle Health’s multi-tenant domain for long-term care, behavioral health and rehabilitation. I have built post-acute revenue cycle, census, scheduling and therapy reporting against it, from inside Oracle and as an independent consultant.
CommunityWorks
The shared, Oracle-hosted domain for community and rural hospitals. On a domain you share and do not administer, DA2 is usually the most direct way to get your own data out, so the reports have to be built to last.
DA2 into Google, Azure and your warehouse
Scheduled DA2 extracts loaded into Google Sheets or BigQuery, Azure SQL or Fabric, Snowflake or another warehouse, and reported from there in Power BI, Tableau or Looker Studio. The data lands somewhere you own and can host your reporting from.
What I do in DA2
Report builds
Queries against Millennium, data cubes, prompts, grouping, crosstabs and calculated columns, built around the question your finance, scheduling or clinical team is actually asking.
Scheduled extracts
DA2 reports that run on a schedule and write their output without anyone pressing Run, picked up by a small pipeline so the numbers are there every morning.
ETL and dashboards
Extracts reshaped, checked and loaded into the warehouse on a schedule, with dashboards on top that show the date of the data they hold and warn when a feed stops arriving.
Report audits
When a total looks wrong it usually is: rows duplicated by a join, a date window on the wrong column, timestamps in a different time zone from the building. I trace the number to its source and make it reconcile.
Training
Hands-on DA2 sessions for the people who write reports and for the managers who run them, on your own domains and data where you allow it.
Where it has been used
- At Oracle Health — post-acute and behavioural health revenue cycle reporting for multi-tenant clients, and DA2, Tableau and Power BI training for their teams. The detail is on the About page.
- For an inpatient rehabilitation hospital, as an independent engagement — daily dashboards for scheduling, therapy services and census built from scheduled DA2 extracts, and a recurring statewide discharge-data submission. Clients are named only with their permission.
How engagements work
- Remote, inside the access you already grant — VPN, remote desktop or Citrix. Patient data stays in systems you control.
- Under a Business Associate Agreement wherever the work touches protected health information.
- Scoped by the work — a fixed build for one report, a block of hours against a backlog, or a training day.
Guides
- DA2, Discern Explorer and the Reporting Portal — which one a request needs
- Automating scheduled DA2 extracts into a dashboard
- Why a DA2 report’s totals come out inflated
- Choosing a DA2 report’s date window, and its time zone
- Getting DA2 data into Google, Azure or your warehouse
- DA2 reporting on the Continuum and CommunityWorks domains
Questions
What is Discern Analytics 2.0?
DA2 is Oracle Health’s reporting tool for Cerner Millennium: a query and report designer that runs as a desktop application and on the web. It replaced Explorer Menu from Millennium 2018.01, and reports built in it can also be run from the Discern Reporting Portal.
Is DA2 the same as Discern Explorer (CCL)?
No. Discern Explorer is Cerner Command Language, the scripting language programmers write against the Millennium database. DA2 is the designer most report writers and analysts use. Plenty of requests that land in a CCL queue can be built in DA2; when one genuinely needs CCL, I say so while scoping it rather than after.
Can DA2 reports run on their own?
Yes. A DA2 report can be scheduled to run in the background and write its output to a file, which is what makes an automated dashboard possible. The work is mostly in what happens next: picking the right file, knowing which day it describes, and noticing when one does not arrive.
Are you affiliated with Oracle?
No. I worked at Oracle Health from 2020 to 2024 and have been independent of it since.
Get in touch
Send a message on LinkedIn with a line on the report or backlog you have in mind, and I will reply there.
Oracle, Oracle Health, Cerner, Millennium and Discern are trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. NorviTech is independent and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Oracle.