Medical Associates Health Centers Cures Reporting Ailments With WebFOCUS

Pervasive BI Platform Encompasses Financial, Clinical, and Administrative Data

Snapshot

Organization Medical Associates Health Centers (MAHC), a group of multi-specialty clinics in southeastern Wisconsin with more than 100 specialists in 27 medical fields and a staff of about 900 people.

The Challenge Make medical and administrative data available, accessible, and meaningful to authorized users throughout the organization.

The Strategy Use BI technology to access clinical and billing information in both individual and aggregate formats, enforcing complete control over who sees what information as required by HIPAA regulations.

The Results Data retrieval and presentation tasks that used to take days now take minutes, enabling MAHC to provide quality care to its patients.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, iWay Software, Professional Services

Information is the lifeblood of today's healthcare industry, yet many healthcare providers are finding that their information systems are in critical condition. The diagnosis? Information overload. Electronic medical records, new types of clinical data, and complex billing systems present healthcare organizations with an enormous amount of information that needs to be exchanged, managed, and integrated online. In addition to the technical challenges associated with these tasks, healthcare providers must enforce HIPAA guidelines and HL7 standards to comply with a raft of industry regulations.

Medical Associates Health Centers (MAHC), a multi-specialty physician-owned clinic in Southeast Wisconsin, is using business intelligence (BI) technology from Information Builders to solve these challenges – while continuing to improve the quality of care it delivers to its patients.

"Our initial motivation for adopting BI technology was to enable our executives and business leaders to make better decisions," explains Pam Shomler, director of decision support at Medical Associates Health Centers. "Now, using Information Builders' WebFOCUS platform, we're distributing the results that BI capabilities provide to our entire organization. WebFOCUS speeds up the reporting process immensely, and it improves the consistency of both standard and ad hoc reporting activities."

Developing a Vaccine for Information Overload

MAHC has long been a leader in its use of healthcare information to improve the patient experience. Since its founding in 1961, the organization has worked diligently to improve its healthcare services and to make healthcare accessible to more people. Unfortunately, as MAHC has grown, getting information out of its information systems in a cohesive way has become increasingly difficult. "Directors made requests that turned into black holes – partly because we had such a hard time figuring out how to sift through all the information," Shomler recalls.

There were other challenges associated with specific information systems, such as an EMR system that couldn't deliver specific clinical information on demand. "In some cases, nurses had to manually audit charts to make sure medical information, such as blood pressure and allergies, was collected appropriately," Shomler adds. "With WebFOCUS we were able to develop an exception report that could quickly identify missing information."

MAHC wanted to adopt a general-purpose reporting environment with a complete set of BI capabilities to take control of this vast influx of information. The company evaluated several BI solutions before selecting WebFOCUS. "What led us to Information Builders was the flexibility, tenacity, and 'can do' attitude of the account executives," Shomler maintains. "Additionally, Information Builders was willing to negotiate reasonable terms as part of a complete BI package that included a report writer, scheduling tools, an integrated dashboard/distribution mechanism, and everything else we needed to create reports without burdening our users."

Responding to an Executive Emergency

While some companies have the luxury of gradually implementing BI technology, Shomler and her team had an urgent reporting project to complete, along with a specific timeline for demonstrating results. "We had nine months to create several major reports as part of a highly visible project," she explains. With several types of data that had to be extracted from well-entrenched legacy systems, it took some time to get the data architecture in place before the team could begin creating reports. "Our goal was to create dashboards and graphical displays to provide management with an easier way to interpret the data. We found that you can't demonstrate any of these capabilities until you address issues of data quality and consistency, which took more time than we anticipated," she adds.

MAHC devised a BI environment that consists of two servers: one to house a repository of reporting data and one to house the WebFOCUS applications. Then they set up a data architecture to extract reporting data from two main information sources: a billing system, where data is stored in a Mumps database, and several clinical information systems, which store data in Microsoft SQL Server databases. Information Builders' Professional Services stepped in to assist with the software implementation process and to train the primary BI stakeholders. "The training from Information Builders was invaluable, and they offered helpful assistance with the data architecture as well," says Shomler.

Shomler and her team met their initial objectives by creating key healthcare quality reports within the allotted time period. Since then, they have made progress on several other fronts as well. "We have several important measurements about the care of our patients, including our overall care of their chronic disease and preventative care measurements," Shomler explains. "For each of these categories, we can provide our physicians with aggregate information on the patients they have within their care." Studying patient data at an aggregate level enables MAHC to examine the patient population and improve the quality of care in several key areas.

Additionally, developers are creating data marts for specific business domains such as appointments, billing, and patient information. Power users depend on WebFOCUS Report Assist and HTML Graph Assist to devise custom reports from these data marts, while less technical business users turn to BI dashboards to view the information.

In both cases, HIPAA regulations governing the privacy of patient data require MAHC to be very careful about security. According to Todd Behrens, user administrator of Decision Support at MAHC, WebFOCUS makes it easy to accommodate these requirements by controlling precisely which information people can see. "Directors, clinicians, and financial personnel can easily enter a doctor's name, a department, a disease state, a date range, or a host of other variables, and the reporting system will generate a report," Behrens says. "Our business analysts use WebFOCUS Report Assist to open up the data marts, find the tables they are used to seeing in our proprietary systems, then create their own ad hoc reports. Ultimately, we hope to create dashboards with critical indicators for our executives as well."

Monitoring the Flow of Healthcare Data

MAHC currently has about 50 clinical customers that use the parameter-driven dashboard reports and 12 analytical customers creating ad hoc reports. More customers of the reporting system are coming on board every day as the department continues to develop a reporting environment that meets their needs.

"We currently have a five-year strategic plan for Decision Support, and we are continuing to operationalize our systems as well as our processes to take advantage of our new reporting capabilities," states Shomler. "Requests for custom reports are rapidly increasing, as we gradually move the organization toward a new reporting standard. Before long, everybody will use WebFOCUS in one form or another. It has become our corporate reporting standard for BI."

Already, WebFOCUS is increasing staff productivity dramatically. One data entry and retrieval procedure that formerly took hours to complete now runs in a few minutes, thanks to an automated reporting tool that helps the clinical staff complete the auditing processes. Additionally, because the organization relies on WebFOCUS ReportCaster to schedule and distribute reports, business users receive reports by e-mail as soon as they are completed – rather than waiting for days, like they did in the past.

Financial users in particular are enjoying marked time-savings. "One proprietary billing report used to take five hours to run. Now it takes about five minutes," Shomler says. "We also have a more automated system for auditing claims data that reveals an aggregate view on how fast our claims are being paid. This payment history report has now become our payor report card."

These same rich reporting capabilities extend to historical data as well. Thanks to technology from iWay Software – an Information Builders company – and the connectivity it provides between Microsoft SQL Server and MAHC's legacy information systems, the Decision Support department can access ten years of patient data that they couldn't easily access before. For example, if a patient had a hysterectomy many years ago, MAHC can feed that information into the EMR system so that physicians always have as much information as possible when they need it.

"Our CEO is pleased with the productivity WebFOCUS lends to our nursing staff, as well as with our ability to generate aggregate reports on the entire patient population," Shomler concludes. "We can retrieve the information faster then ever before, and everybody is looking at the same consistent data. Information Builders has definitely lived up to our expectations with its WebFOCUS platform, and they have supplied the support we need to effectively streamline our data-retrieval and reporting activities."