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"Business Objects had just about everything we would ever need. And not having to bolt together different products from different vendors was incredibly important to us."

Gerry Dauphin
business intelligence architect
IntelliCare

You may already know IntelliCare. More than 300 employees, two-thirds of whom are registered nurses (RNs), staff a massive network of healthcare contact centers that serve patients from around the country with telephonic nurse triage and decision support, among other services. When callers use the nurse line, an IntelliCare RN walks the caller through a series of guideline-based questions before recommending the most appropriate level of care or providing additional health information on a specific healthcare topic.

IntelliCare, a wholly owned subsidiary of PolyMedica Corporation, operates using a unique distributed contact center model that includes five physical brick-and-mortar facilities and a network of professional nurses who have the option of working remotely from home offices. In fact, more then 97% of IntelliCare's registered nurses work remotely.

IntelliCare's clients are as diverse as its network. More than 250 physician groups, insurers, and clinicians - covering roughly 850 healthcare facilities - take advantage of IntelliCare services. This created challenges for the company's IT department, which was charged with making timely data available - including the number of calls served, types of complaints addressed, and so on.

Challenge

The problem? IntelliCare's business intelligence (BI) infrastructure - a homegrown, HTML-based application linked to the company's Crystal Reports® environment - allowed for only basic reporting. "Internal and external users would log in and open up a cascading tab format with several topics, such as 'clinical management,'" says Gerry Dauphin, business intelligence architect at IntelliCare.

The reports were inherently limited in that they didn't allow specific questions to be asked. "We'd have to take specific report requests from managers trying to analyze the basic data," says Dauphin. "Frankly, it wasn't a very efficient way to get enough data with which to make decisions."

That led to a review of more in-depth BI tools. Dauphin and his team settled on BusinessObjects™ Web Intelligence™ Version 6.1 - which improved stability and introduced ad hoc reporting to executives desperately in need of good data. "Our business is always changing," says Dauphin. "We needed up-to-date information to stay competitive. Web Intelligence provided that and freed us from spending an inordinate amount of time handling one-off requests."

The infrastructure still wasn't complete, however. Crystal and Web Intelligence were running side-by-side, and, when Crystal Version 9 was released, IntelliCare implemented a trial version to schedule some individual reports and reduce the already burdensome load on its servers. That worked for a while, says Dauphin, but the disjointed infrastructure eventually led to an inefficient process for compiling billing reports. A migration plan had to be formed.

Approach

Enter BusinessObjects XI, including Data Integrator XI. The idea, says Dauphin, was to eliminate the bottlenecks that hurt performance and caused errors by centralizing from three BI platforms - Crystal Version 8 for basic reporting, Crystal Version 9 for report scheduling, and Web Intelligence for ad hoc reporting - into one infrastructure, pulling from a set of common data sources.

The project proved challenging, and Dauphin hired a specialist services firm - RPF Consulting - to help. "We didn't have enough internal people who knew the Business Objects environment well enough to handle the install without a lot of headaches. RPF sped up the process a lot."

But there was still plenty to contend with. For instance, in the case of billing reports, Crystal had been drawing from data sets that would combine 10 to 15 tables featuring 25,000 or more rows each. The volume slowed the performance of the reporting scheme.

Data Integrator XI relieved the pressure by automating the process of moving data. "We needed to be able to preserve the history of summary and transaction tables to maintain precise patient contact and billing records. Data Integrator spared us countless hours of hand-coding."

In fact, the overall migration process proved to be easier than expected. "Bringing over our BusinessObjects Version 6.1 environment was pretty easy," says Dauphin. "Most of the scheduled reports came over right away, thanks to the import wizard. Roughly 200 reports were moved within two months."

Results

Today, IntelliCare's environment is fully migrated to XI. And even ad hoc reporting is simpler, thanks to a consolidated infrastructure that, with the help of Data Integrator, now boasts a streamlined set of data sources.

Developers also appreciated the tight conformity between the varying pieces of the XI platform. "Having one environment we could do everything in was a real time saver," says Dauphin. "There's a huge difference between developing for one universe instead of three."

"I'm also pleased with support at Business Objects," says Dauphin. "The ongoing improvements have resulted in swifter response times, even for low-severity issues. The engineers work well as a team, engaging each other's help when needed - ensuring my issues get taken care of promptly."

Business benefits are piling up, too. For instance, IntelliCare's BI infrastructure is being scaled up to meet demand from external users for ad hoc reports. "It's a huge win," says Dauphin. "Instead of delivering reports to clients through downloadable PDF files, we'll upgrade security so that clients can be verified by our SSL server. That way, they'll be able to get canned reports or, like our own staff, log into Web Intelligence and create their own. It's cutting-edge client service."

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