Health Organization Gets High Marks With WebFOCUS and Balanced Scorecard
You're trying to see the big picture. But when the jigsaw puzzle has thousands of pieces, that's tough. And when critical pieces are missing, it becomes impossible. You're trying to see the big picture.
That was the dilemma faced by Aurora Consolidated Laboratories (ACL), part of the massive Aurora Health Care system, Wisconsin's largest private employer, which watches the health of more than 175,000 people in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois.
Like many health organizations, ACL needed to watch costs while maintaining high levels of service and customer satisfaction. That's a monumental task for an organization as dispersed as ACL, with 13 hospitals, dozens of clinics and health centers, and 3,500 physicians, reporting through more than 100 cost centers. Even a simple question like "how many people work in your laboratories?" required two to three weeks of research, recalls Chris Peters, Manager of Finance for ACL.
Remarkably, ACL has found a solution that can wrestle useful management information from the tide of data that flows through its systems each day. Since data networks already connect ACL's numerous sites, a Web server is a logical, always-on way to display information to staff. And by using WebFOCUS and other applications from Information Builders, ACL has created a Web-based reporting and communications system that puts extraordinary capabilities at managers' fingertips. They can view up-to-date data on corporate performance, use graphs and charts to spot trends and anomalies, and drill down to discover what's behind those trends.
The Balanced Scorecard
ACL's data requirements went beyond traditional financial measurements. While keeping close watch on costs is critical, the company's management also wanted to measure customer satisfaction, the efficiency of its lab processes, how happy its key partners and suppliers are, and employee motivation and productivity.
These are all part of the organization's decision to implement a "balanced scorecard." Developed by Harvard professor Robert Kaplan and consultant David Norton, the balanced scorecard supplements standard financial measures with less traditional measures that show a company how well it is providing value to customers, maintaining efficient internal processes, communicating its strategic objectives, and learning from feedback.
"These are a lot more 'fuzzy' than financial data," Peters says. ACL had to develop its own surveys, and identify other data points that would help managers track progress in their areas of responsibility.
"Many managers don't pull financial levers directly, but still need good measurements to manage effectively," Peters notes. "The operations director wants to know how successful our laboratories are, how many mistakes they are making, how many tests are completed correctly, how many tests we need to redo. Our sales director wants to know how happy our customers and partners are, and our employees want opportunities for growth and learning."
Understanding Data With WebFOCUS
Clearly, ACL needed a data warehouse that could summarize and abstract many gigabytes of data into the key measures that would give managers a scorecard on how well they were progressing.
Information Builders' software provided the complete solution for all of the different problems in this high-visibility application, says Peters.
"We have quite a few mainframes on our wide-area network, and we noticed a while back that one of our hospitals seemed to have better access to its information," he reports. "It turned out that they had used FOCUS to build a management decision-support system."
ACL began to use FOCUS more widely, and when it sought a Web-based solution for processing data, WebFOCUS was the choice. Its ability to create graphical, drill-down reports, accessible by any Web-based client, was unmatched, and ACL already had programmers on staff familiar with the FOCUS language on which WebFOCUS is based.
Using programming skills efficiently was important to ACL. WebFOCUS runs on many different platforms and delivers data from more than 35 databases. That dramatically reduces the need for detailed coding, and offers a highly scalable system that can grow as ACL's system grows and changes.
ACL also uses Information Builders' EDA, which acts as the translator between the SQL Server database on the Web site and other databases in ACL's far-flung organization.
Quick Start With WebFOCUS InfoCube
The piece that filled the final hole in the puzzle for ACL was WebFOCUS' InfoCube. InfoCube is a set of templates, built by Information Builders consultants to meet the requirements of real-world clients, that provides high-quality preconstructed queries and reports. The reports that InfoCube's templates are designed to deliver – from almost any database, and in client/server or Web-based environments – were exactly what ACL needed.
WebFOCUS InfoCube dramatically shortened the development cycle for ACL and probably saved the organization at least $1 million in programming and consulting costs. Consultants capable of building InfoCube-caliber queries and reports would probably have cost about $3,000 a day and would have taken most of a year developing a solution, Peters estimates.
Instead, the project took about six months, most of that developing the structure of the database, rather than writing code.
"Because of the templates, we deployed it in a much shorter time period," Peters says. "Information Builders put a lot of hours into those templates, and that gave us much of the code we needed."
High Marks From Management
Peters is convinced that WebFOCUS is the right product for ACL's balanced scorecard management philosophy.
"The key is its flexibility, having everything on a Web page, being able to drill down, and to see things in a graphical format," Peters notes.
Behind the scenes, the data access capabilities of the Information Builders solution let ACL collect nuggets of data from across the organization and feed them into SQL databases on its Web server.
"All the data really comes together on the Web site, where we can get at it, drill down to it, look at variances, look at it cost center by cost center," Peters says.
Currently deployed among about 25 users, including senior managers, vice presidents, and selected supervisors, the system will gradually be opened to other managers whose roles are important in meeting corporate goals.
An Easy Transition
The learning curve for administrators has been a short one, because the programming team has been able to take paper reports and duplicate their look and detail on the Web, with one substantial difference.
"These reports look like the old ones but now our people have drill-down capabilities," Peters reports. "Instead of pulling out a second report to get detail that wasn't in the first one, they can click through to the detail they need."
WebFOCUS also gives them flexible options for using reports. They can save an HTML file for later viewing with their browser, create an attractive printout by saving a report in Adobe's Portable Document Format, or select a spreadsheet view.
"It will drop into a spreadsheet where they can do whatever they want with the information," says Peters.
New Horizons
So, how many people work in ACL's laboratories? Peters says he can now deliver that information on demand.
"All that information has been consolidated, and it's on the Web site anytime you want it," he says.
Plenty of untapped potential remains, he adds.
"We can improve the system by using features that WebFOCUS already has," Peters continues. "For example, we would like to make the system more proactive, using WebFOCUS tools that allow you to send an alert when certain conditions are met. This will let us e-mail a supervisor, telling them that they have a variance in their cost center. We can be much more proactive."
Peters concludes that "WebFOCUS has been an excellent choice in giving us all the information we need to measure the success of our organization. It's really letting us see both the forest and the trees."