Diakonessenhuis Makes Healthy Decisions With BI

Dutch Hospital Uses WebFOCUS to Satisfy Increasing Industry Demands for Information

In recent years, demands for information from Dutch hospitals have been increasing at a rapid pace. Last year, healthcare facilities in the region received hundreds of queries regarding quality issues from health insurers, the press, and the Netherlands Healthcare Inspectorate. In addition, patients are requesting access to waiting list information and other important performance indicators.

Internally, information is being used by hospitals to deploy staff and resources, organize departments, and account for budgetary decisions. The nation’s rising B Segment system – in which certain healthcare costs are negotiable – is causing more healthcare providers to invest in cost-driven management, which requires real-time access to complete and accurate data from across the facility.

Smarter Decisions Based on Facts

These are just some of the reasons why Diakonessenhuis needed the ability to thoroughly analyze its data. "Previously, reports were compiled centrally once a month. If you had a specific question that was not addressed in the report, you often had to wait days for the answer," explains Jeroen Lambriks, division manager of the hospital’s Acute and Intensive Care unit. "By the time your question was answered, the next batch of questions would be on the table. In this situation, decisions were often based on intuition, without first consulting valid information. Now we have more direct access to the facts, and that gives us better control."

ECIS by ChipSoft

Diakonessenhuis uses ChipSoft’s Electronic Care Information System (CS-ECIS) information system to manage the data it gathers from its patients and various divisions. "CS-ECIS is used the minute a patient announces him or herself at the reception desk," says Lambriks. "At that moment, we take a digital photograph of the patient with a Webcam, and the patient’s information card is created.

"This photograph and the patient’s data are immediately recorded in CS-ECIS. We also create a diagnosis treatment combination (DTC), so that costs can be charged in retrospect. Subsequently, information is added at every department where the patient receives medical attention. Sometimes, information can be entered using a keyboard, but this could also be digitized X-ray photographs or audio reports recorded in the OR [operating room]."

Once the hospital was sure that the CS-ECIS system was functioning properly, decision-makers began moving toward the next step. "We started looking for applications that could access and consolidate information from ECIS and other systems, and could be used by [anesthesiologists] or facilities service staff, for instance," says Lambriks. "Managers were especially curious about information related to production, waiting times, and change times, and doctors needed detailed information about, for example, visits and inspections from their scientific associations.

"In order to organize processes and departments within Diakonessenhuis as logically as possible, the ability to view data down to the patient level of detail was of crucial importance."

The Implementation of WebFOCUS

To generate this management information in real time, and in digestible chunks, Diakonessenhuis selected Information Builders WebFOCUS, a powerful platform for enterprise business intelligence (BI). WebFOCUS is a comprehensive, fully integrated, enterprise-scale solution that delivers powerful and feature-rich, yet intuitive business intelligence across an entire organization, enabling timely, accurate reporting at the executive, analytical, and operational levels. With WebFOCUS, any data, in any enterprise source (including documents and other unstructured formats), is made readily available, accessible, and meaningful to any user, in any location.

Mount Sinai NYU Medical Center, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, Medical Associates Health Centers, Plexus Medical Group, and Shanghai Railway Central Hospital are among the hundreds of renowned hospitals and healthcare facilities that rely on the WebFOCUS business intelligence platform each day to achieve dramatic productivity increases, while reducing overhead costs and facilitating regulatory compliance. With WebFOCUS, everyone throughout a medical facility – from executives and board members, to administrative staff, nurses, physicians, and clinicians – has instant, unhindered access to the timely, complete, and accurate information they need to make important decisions regarding operations, budgets, patient care, and more.

With WebFOCUS, medical specialists and managers at Diakonessenhuis can now easily compile reports by themselves via a dashboard. In addition, Information Builders – through its iWay Software subsidiary – allows for consolidation of all existing information within the organization. iWay Software’s suite of robust, cutting-edge integration solutions empower organizations to fully leverage their existing technology assets to successfully achieve new goals and meet new challenges – rapidly and cost-effectively. With a single, fully integrated set of graphical design tools and a portfolio of reusable pre-built components, iWay Software eliminates the need for cumbersome and expensive manual code writing, and serves as the foundation for a powerful, enterprise-class infrastructure that integrates, validates, and streamlines any critical business process and related information in the fastest and most economical manner possible.

"We were pleasantly surprised by the presentation given by Information Builders," admits Lambriks. "Our end users are very satisfied with WebFOCUS, but it goes without saying that selecting a vendor was not something we did in just one day.

"We required a test phase of the solution in our OR, a production department where numbers are of paramount importance. We had already mapped out which information needed to be accessed by this department, such as the volume of a certain specialty, surgeons who operated within a certain period, or the relationship between scheduled and actual production. This data had to be very flexible and adjustable as well. So, a proof of concept was a logical step for this project."

A Successful Proof of Concept

After five days, the system was fully operational. It then took approximately a month to fine tune it. "We have learned that it is important to know how data is saved to ECIS," admits Lambriks. "Since we had already acquired some experience in this area, by working with the data from the OR, it all went smoothly. But, for users who are not as experienced, the data warehouse provided by ChipSoft is an interesting option.

"So, of course, we are very pleased that Chipsoft and Information Builders have embarked on a joint venture. I also find it very important that the information is less than one day old, since we do not want to work with obsolete reports. So, the management database is refreshed on a daily basis."

For the staff in the OR department, the implementation of WebFOCUS means they can access authorized information on every personal computer. Information can be accessed in several different ways, and employees can decide for themselves what their focus will be.

The system does not require a great deal of training; users can typically learn how to use it in about half an hour. The many hours of specialist and administrative support time that is saved thanks to the system have resulted in a number of secretarial positions that have become available for other purposes. These people are now being deployed elsewhere in the hospital.

Info On the Go

Now that Administaff has become familiar with WebFOCUS, Dickson and his team are developing new strategies for accessing and delivering information. For example, Administaff plans to introduce more internal users to the power and convenience of self-service reporting. At the same time, IT pros are extracting information into data marts designed for different constituencies. "By staging information into data marts, we can create targeted data sets for additional analysis and reporting that are targeted at specific business domains," says Sheridan.

Administaff also is experimenting with the mobile-computing capabilities of WebFOCUS, both to push critical information to wireless devices and to pull information from production information systems via e-mail. The capabilities for accessing and analyzing information are vast, serving to boost the productivity of internal staff members while increasing client satisfaction.

"We have been very satisfied with WebFOCUS," Sheridan concludes. "The Information Builders team has been very helpful and attentive, both before and after the sale. It's clear they are very interested in our success. All in all, Information Builders is one of the best technology vendors we have worked with."