Hartford Hospital Enhances Reporting

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CHALLENGE
An award-winning acute healthcare center, Hartford Hospital is located in Hartford, Connecticut and serves patients across the state. Founded in 1854 when a catastrophic explosion created a sudden need to treat the injured, today Hartford Hospital has grown into one of the largest medical centers in New England and is a major tertiary care and community healthcare center. The hospital has received many national awards in recognition for medical excellence, community relations work, minority recruitment efforts, and the provision of health services within a diverse population.

A small but dedicated financial systems information services group with only 19 staff supports the hospital administrative system, providing payroll, general ledger, patient billing, and other groups with the information they need to be highly efficient. But like hospitals everywhere, the ever-increasing amount of data flowing into the system made it difficult to improve efficiencies while enhancing reporting capabilities. “We had an increased need for reporting on payers and reimbursements, and really, for reporting across the board,” says Ron M’Sadoques, project manager at Hartford Hospital. “We regularly need to report specific statistics to the state’s health and human services department, and we needed to get more of a handle on the financial information we provide to managers, administrators, and healthcare providers.”
The information services team especially wanted to focus on regular reports that went out to physicians. “Our physician billing system had limited reporting capabilities,” says M’Sadoques. “We had to run SQL reports to physician inboxes.” The SQL reporting system only reported on data from a current month, but healthcare providers and physicians needed data analysis over longer periods of time. Down the road, the team knew it needed to report on clinical data as well as administrative data to help the hospital monitor and improve service levels as well as financial efficiency.

APPROACH
Hartford Hospital was already familiar with the value of business intelligence (BI). “We noticed that every software application came with its own report writer,” says M’Sadoques. “That’s how we originally started working with Crystal Reports®.” Many organizations like Hartford Hospital find they already have this Business Objects reporting tool as an OEM component inside an existing application.

“Because we use multiple systems to manage different types of data, we ended up with multiple logins,” says M’Sadoques. Hartford Hospital quickly realized the benefits of moving to a single BI platform that could ultimately provide a single sign-on system for information access. The organization evaluated several BI vendors, including primary competitors to Business Objects. A key decision point was security around handling sensitive patient data. “The other vendors just didn’t provide that row-level security we needed,” says M’Sadoques. “One leading competitor’s system would have produced a large and unwieldy solution that wasn’t going to work for us. Business Objects was the only vendor that offered an efficient metadata backend with row-level security to protect sensitive data without complex coding.” M’Sadoques adds, “The Business Objects solution was scalable—another key factor in our vendor review.” Hartford Hospital knew it could start with a small solution and add capabilities, users, and data sources as the organization grew. It decided to move to a Business Objects BI platform that would work with the hospital’s existing Crystal Reports and provide a single platform for information management.

Hartford Hospital purchased BusinessObjects™ Enterprise XI Professional for Crystal Reports and has since upgraded to the latest product release from Business Objects, BusinessObjects XI Release 2—all with the help of Business Objects partner, Golden Consulting Group. Hartford Hospital upgraded to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 to take advantage of robust reporting and BI features. “With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, we can run longer term cross-tab reports for physicians so they can see what’s impacting the bottom line,” says M’Sadoques. “They’re very happy with these reports.”

Business Benefits
• Easy access to reporting for healthcare providers
• More efficient reporting
• Savings on information management infrastructure
• A foundation for reducing staffing costs
• A foundation for faster analysis
• A way to improve care while reducing costs

Currently Hartford Hospital creates over 150 reports for delivery to over 150 end users. Healthcare providers receive reports in PDF format delivered directly to their email inboxes. Additionally, hospital administrators and financial analysts can directly log in to the solution to easily access reports.
With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, the hospital also is in the process of incorporating other data into the system—including Kronos, a staff time-tracking and scheduling application, as well as clinical data from an Eclipsys solution. “With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, we’re implementing a centralized information center with a single sign-on system, allowing people to access all the data they need—clinical or financial,” says M’Sadoques.

Partnership
Hartford Hospital’s relationship with Golden Consulting Group has been a long one. Initially the organization was in touch with Golden Consulting to get help with a proof-of-concept, which progressed to assistance implementing the Business Objects solution. “Hartford Hospital definitely got results faster due to the handling of the deployment by a Business Objects partner,” says M’Sadoques. “We could not have deployed the BI solution on our own.”

Golden Consulting Group also provided training for end users, administrators, and technical support staff. According to M’Sadoques, “Training was excellent, and our staff commented that Golden Consulting had the real-world experience they needed to get up to speed.” Golden Consulting Group has helped many healthcare organizations get fast results from their BI solutions. “With the expertise of Golden, we now have access to many reports and features, and we are spending more time discovering even more uses for data and reports,” says M’Sadoques.

Golden Consulting Group is working with Hartford Hospital to incorporate staff-scheduling data into the BI solution, which will give nurse managers and schedule managers the ability to better monitor and schedule staff, helping to avoid the cost of unforeseen overtime hours. “The ability to forecast and analyze staffing trends is a key issue that will result in significant savings annually,” says Erik Golden, VP at Golden Consulting Group. “This kind of reassuring information helps hospital CFOs move on to other critical financial issues without worrying about staffing overtime hurting their bottom line.”

RESULTS
Physicians and other healthcare providers now receive reports delivered to their email inboxes, making it easier for them to look at different levels of treatment over time to see what’s happening in the patient community. “These reports are great because they’re formatted and sent from the server in PDF format. Physicians like to have information pushed to them, and this makes it easy to do,” says M’Sadoques. “Each physician has, of course, different reporting needs, based on the kind of care they provide. With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, we’re able to take an existing report and easily customize it by physician to give them exactly what they need.”

Reporting requests come in from three different types of users—healthcare managers, business managers, and administrators. Now Hartford Hospital more efficiently produces reports that meet user needs. “Almost all reports are run on a scheduler and automatically delivered by email, making reporting faster and more efficient for the financial services department and for end users,” says M’Sadoques. Additionally, the department saved report cycles by eliminating reports that put a high load on IT servers.

The hospital also achieved savings on its information management infrastructure. Previously, Hartford Hospital relied on several different systems for reporting with multiple associated costs. Now Business Objects delivers a single platform for reporting and information management. “Overall, Hartford Hospital has already saved considerably, with a reusable central server that can report off disparate data,” says M’Sadoques. This will add up to even more savings down the road when the hospital adds more data and applications into the BI solution.

Hartford Hospital and Business Objects are working to integrate scheduling data from the nursing group about staff utilization levels. A sudden shortage of staff can result in high overtime costs in order to provide sufficient staffing levels. With over 1,200 nursing staff, improved scheduling means fewer overtime hours and more efficient budgeting. “The metadata inside the Business Objects solution helps us reduce staffing costs,” says M’Sadoques. “And rather than sending constant reports, we’ll be setting up alerting—that way, people only receive emails when something needs to be adjusted.”

In addition to reporting from financial data and patient billing information, the hospital is in the process of incorporating clinical data into its BI solution for faster overall analysis. “Currently providers running reports may not get a complete view of data until the end of the month. But by then, patients may have left the hospital, even though data exists that could have improved treatment or billing,” says M’Sadoques. “With BusinessObjects XI Release 2, data can be collected one day and reported the next, ensuring healthcare providers access the very latest information without a delay.”

Getting fast, quality data and reports to the people who need them most means the hospital more easily sees the links between care and costing. “With quality data available to staff, the hospital has a means of more easily reporting reimbursements to patients and monitoring trends in data,” says M’Sadoques. “For example, keeping infection rates down not only means better care for patients but higher payments back from medical insurers.”

Future plans involve incorporating even more data into the BI platform, including more clinical data about patients. Hartford Hospital hopes to achieve a better picture of the relationship between treatment and costing because, says M’Sadoques, “to provide great care you need to be financially sound.” The hospital is considering using BI to distribute reports to mobile devices—serving up the latest information to healthcare providers, wherever they are, even at the patient’s bedside. Other plans include working with dashboards that monitor key performance indicators and distribute alerts when key measures change. Hartford Hospital also is considering several Business Objects products, including BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager.

ABOUT GOLDEN CONSULTING GROUP

Golden Consulting Group is a Business Objects Gold level partner and is one of New England’s leading providers of technology consulting and training services. Its skills and expertise help large and mid-sized companies to implement business solutions that allow them to track, manage, understand, and report results. Golden Consulting Group has provided technology solutions to mid-sized and Fortune 100 corporations in the northeast for over 30 years.
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