Dialysis Clinic, Inc. Heals Financial Reporting Ailments With WebFOCUS

Information Builders BI Rehabs Reporting Processes to Support Life-Extending Therapy

Dialysis Clinic, Inc. (DCI), a Nashville, TN-based nonprofit healthcare provider was founded in 1971 by a group of nephrologists responding to the scarcity of available dialysis services in the area. Committed to patient rehabilitation and improving care, one of DCI’s key goals has been the continuous enhancement of in-house procedures. But attempts to control costs while maintaining high quality of care were significantly challenged by the organization’s wide diversity of information sources.

Operations related to general ledger, fixed assets, accounts payable, cash management, budgets, financial auditing, cost reports, and payroll were each supported by disparate information systems. This environment made it difficult for DCI stakeholders to track and measure important variables that offer insight and answer questions about how workers and departments spend money.

For example, if DCI’s average cost per treatment increases, is it because fixed costs for drugs and nursing services are rising or because its clinics are treating fewer patients? Answering this kind of question might require accessing data from the inventory, payroll, and various medical systems – a cumbersome process that often requires IT intervention.

To unify these reporting activities and allow business users to access information on their own, DCI implemented Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform. This robust solution supports a wide array of financial reporting activities, empowering users with the insight they need to more effectively manage budgeting and spending.

WebFOCUS not only eliminates the need for DCI staff to spend hours collecting data manually and printing reports, it also provides tools that enable users to immediately identify budget-related issues, so they can better control costs and preserve the bottom line.

Choosing the Right Solution

DCI considered proposals from Information Builders, Hyperion, Oracle, and several other BI vendors. WebFOCUS was selected for its flexibility. WebFOCUS also offers native access to all of DCI’s clinical and financial systems, including Lawson business applications and a combination of legacy RMS files and SQL Server data stores.

"We have a wide range of financial reporting needs, and users have to pull information from disparate systems to make decisions," says Sue Munson, DCI’s financial IT manager. "For example, our medical data is in Microsoft SQL Server, as is our Lawson payroll information. We have data in other systems, such as legacy RMS files and it has always been difficult to merge information from these various data sources into consolidated reports. We purchased WebFOCUS and several key data adapters to give business users a cohesive BI interface to all the information in the organization."

Before WebFOCUS, DCI’s end users were unable to effectively access company data, a lack of self-sufficiency that encouraged them to rely heavily on the IT department. The Lawson payroll system, for example, includes canned reports, but the payroll department requires additional specialty reports detailing various payroll data points. This caused a significant drain on effectiveness in other areas.

Curing Information Access Problems

From what Munson and other financial IT professionals have so far observed, WebFOCUS makes end-user reporting a reality. Using simple, parameter-driven input fields, users can choose columns, sort criteria, define measures, and output formats to generate personal reports. A single guided ad hoc reporting template can generate thousands of different reports to meet various business requirements. Users simply select a data set and access pertinent reports, eliminating the need for IT to write multiple reports to extract business data.

"While we are still in the early phases of our BI initiatives, it’s clear that WebFOCUS offers us a new level of self-service," Munson confirms. "It acquires data from multiple sources, automates user reporting, and provides a single tool for query and analysis. Soon, everyone will be able to produce financial reports directly from one system. They will simply drill in and WebFOCUS will grab the data, wherever it resides, to create cohesive reports. Users won’t have to be concerned about where the data is coming from to create a graph, chart, or display."

These users will be able to save time and avoid errors with the ability to select from a variety of useful file formats, including Microsoft Excel. This eliminates hours of manual re-keying from paper documents or having to copy and paste information into spreadsheets. WebFOCUS automatically generates native Excel formulas, and translates numeric values and dates into supported Excel equivalents. Clicking on embedded hyperlinks in Excel produces the same drilldowns as those created in an HTML report.

Business users will soon be able to get the data and choose the format they want. "We’re also learning that if we build our queries well for ad hoc reporting, power users will be able to access the information and write their own queries," Munson adds. "This will give them a huge amount of flexibility to access much more information than they’ve been able to access in the past. It all frees up time for the IT team, making us more efficient as an organization."

A Healthy Dose of Benefits

Using WebFOCUS to exchange reliable information will help DCI cope with the myriad challenges of today’s healthcare marketplace. For example, instead of printing lengthy financial statements and then searching manually for account data, managers will be able to drill down through parameterized forms to collect relevant information. If certain line items within an income statement are outside of expected norms – such as drug costs or nurses’ salaries – WebFOCUS can send an alert to the pertinent manager.

"Our income statements are based on cost per treatment," Munson explains. "Setting up automatic alerts with WebFOCUS will allow us to monitor our direct expenses very closely, which will help us control costs and could potentially have a big impact on the bottom line. We’re very happy with the direction we’re going with WebFOCUS, and there’s a whole set of new capabilities we’re looking forward to using. For example, we want to develop dashboards to give our reporting environment a more actionable and user-friendly look."

While the first phase of the WebFOCUS implementation targets the needs of corporate personnel at headquarters, DCI plans to roll out end-user reporting capabilities to its 260 clinics across the U.S. to enable administrators and management to access in-depth financial information.

"Information access, cost reductions, and revenue enhancements – it all helps DCI support a more efficient workforce," Munson sums up. "As users perform more self-service functions, our IT team will be free to focus on strategy and planning future directions."