Customers

Central Maine Healthcare

Central Maine Healthcare"The combination of products and functionality in BusinessObjects Edge Series give us quick and easy business intelligence (BI) capabilities today, when we need it."

Wayne Bennett
vice president of finance
Central Maine Healthcare

Challenge

Central Maine Healthcare (CMHC) is an integrated healthcare delivery system serving approximately 400,000 residents of central and western Maine. In the late 1990's, CMHC merged with the two 20-bed satellite hospitals. Since the merger, and as a result of its strategy to deliver more comprehensive services, CMHC experienced significant growth, forcing the mid-sized health organization to re-evaluate its BI needs relating to financial and operational data.

The first step was to merge financial systems to produce a consolidated balance sheet. CMHC wanted to align its business strategies with metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) drawn from across the organization, and make the information available in the context of business goals. Wayne Bennett, vice president of finance at CMHC, explains, "this would enable managers to make decisions that map to CMHC strategic objectives, like improved operational efficiency, profitability, patient throughput, quality of care, and ultimately improve business performance."

CMHC wanted "all levels of management to be able to evaluate both departmental data and overall business performance," says Bennett. He continues, "we needed an affordable BI platform that would provide managers and executives with easy access to one set of tools that they could use to find consolidated information linked to our strategic objectives."

Approach

sdg Management Intelligence, a Business Objects certified partner, recommended BusinessObjects Edge Series for flexible reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, interactive dashboards, and visual analytics - all in one product suite.

"BusinessObjects Edge Series provides an enormous breakthrough for us, in reassuring our executives and managers about the validity of their data," says Bennett. "Now they know the decisions they make are based on accurate, timely information. With this level of granularity, they can drill down and investigate any anomalies that show up. They simply couldn't do that before. Instead of worrying about the data, we can all focus on aligning our efforts with key corporate strategies to improve business performance," says Bennet.

Crystal Reports provides the data for Crystal Xcelsius high-level dashboards. One departmental report - the daily revenue reconciliation report - provides managers with the ability to drill down to see individual healthcare service dates and corresponding revenue. Building high-level Crystal Xcelsius dashboards on top of report data gives managers and executives actionable information in the context of KPIs that map to strategic goals. "The reports and the dashboards integrate in a single intranet portal and support each other with the same data - providing a single version of the truth," says Bennett.

Results

CMHC's report and dashboard delivery mechanism reaches all level of managers. "Within one week of deployment, we went from zero reports to delivering reports to managers across all departments," says Bennett. Executives and mid-level management use BusinessObjects Edge Series to link actionable information at the departmental level with strategic KPIs - enabling all levels of management to align decisions with overall corporate strategies.

CMHC plans to evolve to BusinessObjects Enterprise for a complete BI platform that will integrate financial and clinical data. CMHC also plans to use the Web-based query and analysis capabilities within BusinessObjects Edge Series called BusinessObjects Web Intelligence. This will allow managers to create ad hoc Web reports to analyze market share data.

"BusinessObjects Edge Series is just right for our BI needs today," says Bennett. "It's affordable, it works with standard tools and technology, and it's compatible with our back-end systems so that we can easily consolidate data for more strategic reports."

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