Nemours
"BI is critical for healthcare organizations. To provide effective services that improve the health of children, our physicians and researchers must have access to complete, accurate patient data. Business Objects is the only organization able to deliver a complete EIM solution that's tightly integrated with the rest of our BI deployment."
Ed Todd,
data warehouse manager
Nemours
Challenge
One of the nation's largest providers of pediatric healthcare services, Nemours employs more than 400 specialty physicians and surgeons. In 2005, the company cared for 238,000 children. Nemours owns and operates the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, and four major children's specialty centers in Wilmington, Jacksonville (FL), Orlando, and Pensacola.
As a result, the company manages a tremendous amount of operational, financial, and clinical data. And because Nemours deals with sensitive patient data, the ability to provide secure access to consistent, trustworthy information is critical.
But the company's ability to efficiently manage data became problematic when it upgraded its hardware and application software. ShowCase Suite from SPSS - Nemours' warehouse software vendor at the time - didn't offer the products the company needed to operate in its new environment. In addition, says Ed Todd, data warehouse manager at Nemours, "We were having problems replacing a product called Data Junction. It wasn't robust enough to handle our large volumes of data, and it wasn't a multiuser platform. It also didn't do some transformations correctly. In the medical field, if you can't do an HL7 type file format, people will ask if you're really in healthcare. Data Junction couldn't do HL7s correctly, so that was a real problem for us."
Approach
When Nemours upgraded its hardware, Todd says, "It really freed us up to search for a best-of-breed BI solution. When it came down to features, costs, and ease-of-use, the hands-down winner was clearly Business Objects." From Business Objects, an SAP company, Nemours chose for its information management softare BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI Release 2, BusinessObjects Metadata Manager XI Release 2, Crystal Reports, and Crystal Enterprise
BusinessObjects Data Integrator proved itself quickly in providing the ETL capabilities Nemours required. "We were having problems using files off an old AS400 that was running DB2," says Todd. "Data Integrator was able to successfully read those files like a champ. We were able to get very large files extracted and loaded in a relatively short period of time, compared to other tools we had tried to use. Data Integrator did the job quickly and seamlessly."
Todd says he finds Data Integrator to be a "very intuitive" product: "We gave the installation disks for Data Integrator to our database administrator, and he had them for about two hours. He made one call to tech support to ask a configuration question, and he was able to do his first transfer. No training. No complications or issues. With Data Integrator, it's clear what you need to do."
BusinessObjects Metadata Manager, another part of the Business Objects information management software, enables Nemours to easily trace its data's lineage. "In the healthcare environment," says Todd, "a great deal of data is generated during a patient's treatment process. Managing all this data is crucial for identifying what data is available, who created it, who changed it, and when it was changed."
With Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise, Nemours now has the reporting standardization, consistency, security, and efficient distribution capabilities it was looking for. And also the automation, notes Todd. "Our whole reporting process is scheduled so that we don't have to remember to run anything. It just runs off the scheduler," he says.
Results
Nemours, Todd says, is very happy with the results it has seen from its Business Objects deployment. "One of the biggest advantages of BI from Business Objects," he says, "is that it has a web interface. We can log into a web page and look at everything that has been executed for that day very quickly. We couldn't do that before. From an administrative or management perspective, it's wonderful."
Today, Business Objects EIM solution is enabling Nemours to better manage its operational, financial, and clinical data. "Operational data accounts for about 50% of the data we need to manage," Todd says, "and financial data accounts for about 25%. When you have something as people-intensive as running a hospital, being able to account for your labor costs is very important. We're now able to provide reports on actual costs on a timely basis, plus compare those actual costs to the budget or to a previous time period. So we're able to see variances in both dollars and in percentages - and we get all this information on one screen or one page. That's pretty powerful."
Nemours is now able to track a great deal of clinical data also - including patient encounters per physician, patient medications, medical devices administered, patients who are affected by recalls of medication or medical devices, disease outbreaks, and more.
"In the future," Todd says, "we can see ourselves evolving to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 - probably within a year. And we can see taking advantage of Xcelsius™ - with all its dashboarding and interactive data-viewing power."
Nemours has become a "believer" and advocate of business intelligence, especially for its industry. "BI is critically important for healthcare organizations," says Todd. "To provide effective services to improve the health of children, our physicians and researchers must have access to complete, accurate patient data. Business Objects is the only organization to deliver a complete enterprise information management solution that's tightly intergrated with the rest of our BI deployment."
Todd says, "Together, Business Objects and EIM solutions are helping us improve the quality of information and overall visibility into our work so we can provide the best pediatric healthcare to our nation's most vulnerable population."
Quick Facts
- Industry:
Pediatric healthcare - Business Process:
Operational, financial - Challenge:
When Nemours upgraded its hardware and application software, its existing vendor didn't offer the products Nemours needed to work in its new environment. Nemours needed a best-of-breed solution that made it easy to extract, transform, and load a tremendous amount of data - from various source systems - into its enterprise data warehouse. - Why Business Objects?
Nemours chose Business Objects tools for their ease-of-use and tight integration with the Business Objects BI platform. - Business Objects products and services:
BusinessObjects Data Integrator XI Release 2, BusinessObjects Metadata Manager XI Release 2, Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise