Hospitals Cut Costs With BI Software

Two hospitals in Florida and California are using business intelligence and analytic software to corral costs and aid clinical reporting.

Mitch Wagner, California Bureau Chief, Light Reading

December 23, 2009

2 Min Read
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Two healthcare providers on opposite coasts are improving their bottom lines by implementing business intelligence software from different vendors.

Watson Clinic, in Lakeland, Fla., is implementing business analytics software from Dimensional Insight, while, on the other side of the country, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP) is benefiting from a seven-year-old McKesson implementation.

Watson Clinic implemented the Dimensional Insight software to get rapid information access on financial metrics and clinical reporting to organization users.

Watson Clinic implemented Dimensional Insight's The Diver Solution, which includes a dashboard, reporting, and analytics software to integrate data from different systems, including GE Healthcare and billing and accounts receivable.

Watson Clinic has more than 1,500 employees and 200 physicians at 16 locations. The clinic is creating multiple views into data for users, including monitoring available appointments, viewing daily charges versus actual and forecast, analyzing monthly forecasts by department and service line reporting.

Meanwhile, CHOMP improved profits and cut costs with document management software from McKesson. CHOMP deployed McKesson's Horizon Patient Folder software to aid cash flow, regulatory compliance, expense cutting, and patient care.

CHOMP installed the software seven years ago, replacing paper-based health information management processes across the 15-facility healthcare system, reducing days not final billed from six days to two and a half days. The software also accelerated reimbursement and generated cash flow benefit of more than $4 million.

CHOMP credits the document management solution with more than $250,000 in annual staffing and supply cost savings. CHOMP later integrated the software with a clinical system installed in 2004.

"With Horizon Patient Folder, our medical and administrative teams can access and manage the full legal medical record across our enterprise from a single system, which means more efficient processes and complete access to critical information," said Madelyn Burke, CHOMP's director of HIM, in a statement. "The system also gives us confidence that we can successfully handle the demands of increasingly complex regulations and requirements presented by dynamics such as HIPAA, CMS audits and the economic stimulus."

Formerly, physicians had to sort through stacks of paper records to sign patient charts, but now they can access documents, including deficiency work lists and wound photos, securely through the clinical system viewer or on a laptop at home.

CHOMP is located in Monterey, California. It is a nonprofit healthcare provider with 205 staffed acute-care hospital beds and 28 skilled-nursing bed. It has 15 locations on the Monterey Peninsula, including hospital, outpatient facilities, satellite laboratories, a mental health clinic, short-term skilled nursing facility, hospice, and business offices.

About the Author

Mitch Wagner

California Bureau Chief, Light Reading

Mitch Wagner is California bureau chief for Light Reading.

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