HIPAA News

Hospitals Embrace Business Intelligence and Integration Technologies From Information Builders to Increase Revenue and Improve Patient Care

(Dec 10, 2008)-- Information Builders has announced that numerous healthcare organizations are using WebFOCUS and iWay Software to bill for more revenue, reduce costs, and gain better visibility into operations to improve patient care. Information Builders has seen more than 100 percent growth in its healthcare business in 2008. Hospitals today maintain an immense amount of information that must be carefully stored, analyzed, and exchanged. NYU Langone Medical Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, University of Virginia Department of Medicine, Clarian Health, and others have selected Information Builders to streamline the flow of this information and to track financial, clinical, and operational performance.

"Hospitals and healthcare providers depend on precise information to control costs, monitor patient trends, and ensure that patients get the quality care they need," said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder of Information Builders. "To do this, more and more healthcare provider organizations are turning to BI and integration technologies."
"Many providers are aggressively pursuing strategies in response to escalating costs, increased competition, and price and quality transparency," said Alan Eisman, director of Healthcare Solutions for Information Builders. "As data has become digitized, providers are using BI as a key enabler in this transformation to guide and empower stakeholders, enhance the revenue cycle, increase productivity, and improve care."

With Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform, Mount Sinai discovered it had undercharged patients and insurance companies by $4.5 million. Mount Sinai used WebFOCUS to pull financial data from various data warehouses and allow accounts receivables personnel to slice and dice the data to conduct payment variance queries and to look for outliers. Through ad hoc analytics and reporting, end users can easily query specific information and identify rebilling opportunities. Over the last year, Mount Sinai has been able to recover $2.5 million in revenue from insurers who underpaid patient bills.
"In addition to using WebFOCUS to identify underpayments, we also use it across the hospital for departmental reporting," said David Fuld, director of decision support for Mount Sinai Hospital. "We wanted a system that allowed nontechnical users to easily access and bring data to these meetings without needing the IT department to pull the reports. WebFOCUS made this possible by allowing users to easily create drill-down reports, containing visual analytics and color coding, and push key information out to other users, via commonly-used formats such as Excel."

As the fourth largest hospital in Arkansas, Jefferson Regional Medical Center serves more than 280,000 residents in 11 counties. Licensed for 471 beds and with an average daily census of about 240 patients, the hospital employs more than 2,000 people. Jefferson Regional implemented WebFOCUS to construct a self-service reporting environment that organizes reports into three primary groups: financial reports for the finance department, productivity reports for department managers, and bed management reports for hospital administrators. The BI environment enables clinicians and administrators to quickly hone in on specific information related to patients, reimbursements, payer mixes, admissions trends, staff productivity, and dozens of other business functions. WebFOCUS has boosted staff productivity, improved physician deficiency rates, and cut costs throughout the facility.

"Providing good care is our primary objective, but of course we want to do that within the bounds of what is reasonable and financially responsible," said Morie Mehyou, an assistant vice president of IM and decision support at Jefferson Regional. "WebFOCUS gives us the insight we need to create a more efficient operation. It is one of the best technology investments the hospital has made. The cost is minimal, and the return has been phenomenal."

Clarian Health, the largest healthcare provider in the Midwest, is standardizing on iWay for business-to-business (B2B) and application-to-application (A2A) projects. Based on experience to date, Clarian projects an ROI of $10 million. Located in Indianapolis, Indiana and consistently cited as one of the top healthcare organizations in the U.S., Clarian Health has a history of firsts, including the nation's first lung-pancreas transplant. The organization thrives on embracing cutting-edge medical procedures and innovative information technology.

The Clarian Revenue Cycle Services division's current project is to implement the EDI Health Care Claim Status Request (HIPAA EDI 276). With iWay's HIPAA solution, Clarian can initiate an automatic request for information on claims past a certain date and receive back information automatically. The automation of this business process reduces phone calls and decreases administration costs for the requester. Implementing HIPAA EDI 276/277 processing will automatically generate and submit queries, eliminating the need for manual entry of individual queries or calls to a contractor to obtain this information. iWay HIPAA solution will help Clarian improve business agility, reduce costs, and eliminate inefficiencies.
"iWay makes it more cost effective and efficient for us to manage these integration challenges," said David Burton, executive director of I.T. Clarian Revenue Cycle. "The first project was completed four weeks early and under budget. The second project had 80 percent reusability from the first project, which is key. It gives us a great ROI with the speed and security of knowing it works."

Using Information Builders WebFOCUS platform, Netherlands-based Plexus has created a nationwide system that delivers information about costs, reimbursements, treatment success rates, and many other key performance indicators (KPIs). The BI solution, called Pi, helps providers analyze the quality and efficiency of their primary processes, and then compares these results to national benchmarks. Hospitals using Pi may have cost reductions of up to 10 percent of their annual budgets, thanks to insight derived from the system.

"All healthcare organizations strive to provide high-quality care for an equitable price. But how do these organizations know if they are achieving this goal without precise measures," asked Erik-Jan Vlieger, senior consultant at Plexus Medical Group. "We're using BI technology to give administrators and physicians a level of visibility into their facilities and processes that was formerly difficult to achieve, so they can improve the quality and value of their services."

The UVA Department of Medicine successfully implemented the WebFOCUS BI platform, merging financial reports, faculty remuneration plans, statistics, data tracking, and clinical billing reports. More than 300 users now depend on WebFOCUS to bridge two accounting systems and satisfy a diverse set of reporting requirements, including the ability to tightly integrate the new reports with Microsoft Excel. The health system also uses the software to create trend reports, such as in-depth analysis of areas where expenses are rising in various divisions. WebFOCUS improved the efficiency of employees throughout the organization, with direct savings of more than $150,000 per year.

"We needed a reporting environment that was easy to use and could handle the needs of our physicians, as well as our clinical and department administrators," said Elizabeth Wildman, vice chair and chief operating officer for the Department of Medicine. "With WebFOCUS, we now have a single reporting tool to take care of our most acute business needs."

NYU LMC created a Web-based Labor Productivity tool with WebFOCUS that leveraged existing payroll, billing, and budget data and delivered it in a fresh and radically useful way. The new system, a holistic combination of people, processes, and technology, empowered hospital department managers to measure and monitor labor utilization while controlling associated costs quickly and easily. It transformed what was previously a theoretical exercise into timely, meaningful, and actionable information that was a major piece in helping NYULMC achieve and maintain a major reduction in salary. The system also identified opportunities for more accurate patient billing, and a favorable labor budget, while instilling a culture of accountability throughout the organization.

Using the new system, NYULMC's 230 department managers can now quickly and easily analyze the productivity of their departments with a few mouse clicks. "More than just reporting statistics," said Mary Tedaldi, RN, MS, MA and senior director of NYULMC's Performance Management Office, "the Labor Productivity tool provides management with a structured approach to understanding the root cause of favorable and unfavorable results and taking corrective action where necessary."

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