Streamlining a Large, Diversified Healthcare Organization Through Enterprise Reporting Implemention

For any well-run healthcare organization, identifying and implementing innovative ways to deliver high quality care at competitive prices is an on-going priority. That’s why one leading health care ministry providing integrated medical assistance to communities on the east coast, boasting over 40 facilities, including hospitals, nursing care, assisted living and retirement homes, home health services and hospice, and employing more than 25,000 people in ten states, came to Innovative Information Resources looking for advice.

iiR’s Challenge:

In order to start the customer’s company on its path of clearing out inefficiencies and taking advantage of coordinated purchasing opportunities, Innovative Information Resources (iiR) was initially called on to create several reports with Crystal Decisions’ Crystal Reports application, to generate metrics for supply expenses and other financial areas.

Through reporting, potential cost savings would be identified to enable the organization to determine vendor consolidation opportunities (and resulting lower supply costs), and expired discounts lost. In short, the organization anticipated greater visibility into their financial and operational performance, resulting in identifiable and actionable cost-saving items.

The Result

The customer’s reports now give managers and executives across all departments, key information regarding their performance. Management is able to identify areas where cost savings, streamlining, and efficiencies can be implemented, daily, instead of waiting weeks for performance information to become available. From the first few weeks of the new system, inefficiencies were already being corrected, and substantial money was being saved. Through implementation of a strategic and integrated enterprise reporting system, our customer now readily identifies what the issues are, what issues will come, and how to best contend with them. Their business runs more efficiently, money is saved, processes become faster, retraining becomes easier, and the system requires less hands-on labor.

In other words, reporting is a vital, on-going mechanism or tool that enables this large and diversified healthcare organization to keep an eye on expenses, institute savings, and move towards its objective of streamlining expenses by $30 million this year.

Failing Enterprise Reporting Implementation Corrected For Large, Diversified Healthcare Organization

A large Seattle-based health care provider, with clinics and hospitals throughout the state of Washington, had moved to implement Lawson Financials, an enterprise reporting system, on their company computer system, but found that with just a few months before the software was due to go ‘live’, their staff were struggling to get the most out of the product.

iiR’s Challenge:

The client’s management team had become very concerned about the speed with which essential custom reports were being developed by their staff. The personnel who had been set the task of implementation had spent months writing reports which ran far too slowly, if they ran at all, and many tasks were still unfinished. The management team for the implementation felt that if these reports were not ready quickly, it might jeopardize the success of the entire system, and after a series of difficult and contentious staff meetings where these reporting issues were raised, the decision was made to seek help from iiR.

The Result

Our client was able to “go live” with Lawson Financials in full confidence, with their report system fully developed, fully distributed, and handled by team members that were no longer overwhelmed by the challenges ahead of them.

By serving as a virtual ‘enterprise report shock force’, the iiR team oversaw report architecture, construction, implementation and the creation of a set of standards that would allow technical employees to maintain the system without problem for years to come.