Iizuka Improves Medical Care With WebFOCUS

Japan’s Iizuka Hospital improved its quality of care and operations management capabilities with Information Builders WebFOCUS business intelligence platform.

Japanese Hospital Uses Information Builders BI to Meet New Reporting Requirements and Manage Operations

Iizuka Hospital, owned by Aso Groups, was founded in 1918 with the primary goal of providing healthcare and improving the welfare of its patients. The hospital has grown since then. In addition to providing emergency medical services, the hospital supports other local hospitals and clinics with its advanced technologies and facilities. To improve the quality of medical services, Iizuka became one of the first hospitals to join the Diagnostic Procedure Combination (DPC), and began leveraging related information using WebFOCUS.

DPC was introduced in 2003, as part of the medical service reform proposed by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. Iizuka joined DPC in July of 2004, becoming one of only 144 facilities to participate at that time. Today, more than 360 medical facilities with 19 million beds belong to DPC.

While conventional systems follow a payment by results methodology, where medical fees increase in accordance with diagnostic points assigned to each type of treatment, DPC advocates a more comprehensive approach to payment, where fees are determined based on specific diseases, surgeries, treatments, etc., and points are automatically rated on a daily basis. This helps to curb excessive or unnecessary medical care because additional shots and medications do not impact the pre-rated points and associated fees.

New Requirements Demand Improved Reporting

In accordance with DPC guidelines, member hospitals must submit specific data in the same format every month. That data includes: medical care record information; yield information using the medical points table; medical bill information based on DPC rules; details on cases involving treatments not covered by medical insurance; and facility statistics (average hospital days, bed occupancy rate, etc.). The DPC aggregates and codes the disease-related information collected from member hospitals, so diagnosis data about those diseases can be used by medical facilities throughout the country.

Upon joining DPC, Iizuka hospital planned to introduce an information analysis system to more effectively retrieve and format the data DPC required. Providing that information calls for doctors and nurses to manually enter the medical care record, which includes examinations, medications, etc., into the DPC ordering system.

Since data was being collected in a standard format, the hospital wanted to use it to improve operations management and quality of care by benchmarking performance against other area hospitals, performing macro- and microanalysis of key metrics, and comparing the new comprehensive payment system with the prior payment by results system.

“We wanted to provide an environment where doctors can think about medical care from various perspectives by giving feedback that shows the status of their hospital,” says Fumio Fukumura, DPC management section chief. Iizuka ultimately chose the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform from Information Builders.

WebFOCUS is a comprehensive, fully integrated, enterprise-scale platform 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.

Senior management, department managers, and key members of the information systems team created models of desired reports, and then attempted to build those reports using various available tools. Multifunctional BI solutions, such as Business Objects and PowerPlay, were examined but they were difficult to use and required the knowledge of specialists. Furthermore, these tools made it impossible to perform link manipulation between related reports.

WebFOCUS Creates a Healthier System

With WebFOCUS, on the other hand, the hospital could create more than 100 sample reports in just one month without any specialized training. Users appreciated the ability to drill down to detailed information simply by clicking through on elements contained in summary reports. For example, a user running a general report on nervous system conditions can then drill down on specific types of diseases – such as brain tumors – to see the individual cases, dates, and treatment performed. These, and many other benefits, were why WebFOCUS was chosen over other solutions.

“Ashisuto provided terrific support during testing, helping us to build the reports we wanted and populate the needed data,” says Hironori Hisakawa, chief of the hospital’s Information Systems Department. “They were also very flexible when it came to addressing our changing needs during the development process.”

After purchasing WebFOCUS, Iizuka spent quite a bit of time on a very important task – defining the information included and the layout required for each set of users. Sample reports were built and shown to department managers and staff members for feedback. The flexibility of WebFOCUS proved very helpful during this process, allowing them to create and modify reports quickly and easily.

The reporting environment went live a year-and-a-half after WebFOCUS was installed. Initially, only the hospital’s Planning Department and DPC Management Team were granted the ability to access and continue modifying the system. Gradually, other departments came on board. User opinions were essential to determining what information was needed, and how it should be presented.

“There is no need to accumulate and analyze data if it won’t impact day-to-day medical care or hospital management strategies,” Hisakawa adds. “Since WebFOCUS is so easy to use, we can continuously improve the system by developing new, more useful reports.”

Because WebFOCUS is completely Web-based, any user across the hospital can easily view reports simply by typing in a URL. To preserve the integrity and confidentiality of the data in the reports, Ashisuto proposed enhancing the reporting environment with Securecompo, developed by Toray. Securecompo is a robust security software package that prevents unauthorized access to data. It integrates seamlessly with WebFOCUS, providing extended security without requiring any changes to the underlying applications. It also automates menu control.

In the future, Hisakawa would like to better understand how other companies use WebFOCUS, to get ideas for new enhancements. Additionally, he would like Ashisuto to incorporate graphing functionality into the WebFOCUS environment.