While vendors talk of developing newer underlying technology and marrying clinical data with financial data, the heart of business decision support systems for hospitals is still determining the cost of a particular service, said Paul Pitcher, director of financial systems for KLAS Enterprises. Contract management and modeling and budgeting are standard capabilities of these systems. The unproven trend is whether business decision support systems can support pay for performance−something that Pitcher says is still five to ten years out. KLAS released its year-end report mid-December 2006; however Healthcare IT News’ January 2007 issue was at press before this report. As a result, this unranked list is based on data derived in mid-November 2006.
Avega Health Systems
Alliance Decision Support
Avega, a subsidiary of MedAssets, Inc., offers Alliance, a robust suite of industry-leading decision support and enterprise reporting tools that support the MedAssets mission to improve healthcare providers’ cash flow and operating margin from existing operations. By integrating financial, clinical and administrative information, as well as key business indicators for decision making, Alliance improves clinical performance, controls costs, manages/negotiates contracts, develops budgets and analyzes productivity across your organization with industry-standard reporting and web-distribution-based tools.
What distinguishes you from the competition? Avega has been focused solely on healthcare Decision Support for more than 20 years. Simply stated, it is all that we do. Our ability to consistently deliver in this area is never tempered with the ability to sell/implement a larger, ancillary system. Our original founders are still the leading force of Avega today. This steady, tenured focus differentiates Avega from many DSS vendors whose leadership has changed, and greatest sources of creativity have moved on.
Where are your R&D efforts to enhance your product within the next two years? Avega is committed to remaining at the forefront of technology. We believe our R&D commitment to be the highest level of investment of any DSS vendor. Our smaller competitors’ revenues are significantly less than our investment; while Avega’s larger competitors direct limited dollars to their DSS products. In 2007 and beyond, the Alliance Suite will feature fully integrated budgeting capabilities with Alliance’s other components, enhanced workflow capabilities throughout the system, and additional enterprise reporting functionality.
Where is the opportunity to have greater use of clinical data in your system? Avega provides the ideal platform to monitor and improve patient quality. Data sets from any source can be integrated, leading to decision making related to patient safety, clinical indicator performance, atypical event tracking, utilization management and microbial surveillance. A vast reporting opportunity exists to link clinical events and operational and financial impacts in a highly visual format, greatly reducing analysis time and accelerating interventions leading to reduced length of stay.
Eclipsys
Sunrise Decision Support
Sunrise Decision Support Manager integrates data collected in clinical and financial departments throughout the healthcare organization (HCO) in a patient-centric repository. Supporting a “closed-loop” process of management, Decision Support Manager supports informed analysis, planning, integration and measurement in clinical and financial areas to provide the ability to forecast and model changes based on case volume/mix, empower HCOs to better negotiate managed care contracts and monitor payer compliance, and enable clinicians to examine longitudinal episodes of care for specific user-defined disease types.
What distinguishes you from the competition? Sunrise Decision Support gives organizations an improved ability to manage based on ability to analyze, measure and make conclusions, understanding where making and losing money, as without this system they don’t know where they are winning and losing. With Sunrise Decision Support, organizations can develop improved operational plans to make more accurate predictions of staffing and resource requirements, focus resources on profitable ventures and create realistic targets with meaningful variance reporting.
Where are your R&D efforts to enhance your product within the next two years? Eclipsys R&D focus for the upcoming two years is on two principle areas: Putting information in the direct hands of the decision maker through a publishing portal that will give managers access to up-to-date decision support data on their desktops 24 hours a day and extending the depth of clinical data in the decision support repository to automate the development of sophisticated reporting objects focused on quality management analysis, pay-for-performance measures, clinical practice analysis, clinical decision support analysis and outcomes analysis.
Where is the opportunity to have greater use of clinical data in your system? Sunrise Decision support provides the ability to “flag” patients that trigger industry standard or HCO-specific indicators signifying the occurrence (or nonoccurrence) of important clinical events. Two capabilities would specifically benefit from increased use of clinical data−care planning and care monitoring. Care planning aggregates historical patient activity and resource utilization information by case, day or phase and model the details to develop, or comply with, HCO best-practice or targeted treatment protocols. Care monitoring stores best-practice and targeted-resource profiles in the form of resource protocols or critical paths for concurrent or retrospective variance analysis.
Enterprise Performance Systems, Inc. (EPSi)
Enterprise Analyst; Enterprise Cost Manager, Enterprise Budget Manager, Capital Budget Manager, Product Line Analyst, Enterprise Reporting Manager, Enterprise Management Dashboard, and Enterprise Productivity Manager
EPSi was formed by a group of financial decision support professionals who realized that the healthcare industry was burdened with expensive and archaic financial planning technology. Their goal in creating EPSi was to leverage the latest Internet technology to provide state-of-the art financial decision support tools at an affordable price. Today, EPSi offers the industry’s most advanced and functionally rich decision support tools for financial planning. The company’s field-proven toolset provides executives and frontline managers access to critical information, helping them make timely, more informed decisions.
What distinguishes you from the competition? EPSi’s unique suite of Web-based decision-support applications provides a completely integrated financial planning solution. Our toolset includes: Payroll Budgeting, Productivity, Flexible Budgeting, Financial Modeling, Cost Accounting, Product Line Analysis, Contract Modeling, Capital Budgeting, an Enterprise-wide Reporting System, as well as an Enterprise Management Dashboard. These modules operate as an integrated system or can be purchased and used individually.
Where are your R&D efforts to enhance your product within the next two years? EPSi continues to enhance its full product suite and improve the baseline functionality. The next release of our software, Rev. 6.5 will be out in January 2007 and we will release additional enhanced versions approximately twice a year going forward.
Where is the opportunity to have greater use of clinical data in your system? EPSi has closely mapped the key quality performance indicators with cost data in its system. Our goal is to align with current and future market requirements to link cost and quality data in order to report on and analyze the outcome of clinical process improvement/patient safety and regulatory agency measures.
McKesson
Horizon Performance Manager
McKesson’s Horizon Performance Management solution provides a comprehensive approach to clinical and financial analytics that enables healthcare organizations to manage cost and quality across the care continuum. Decision support functionality for cost accounting, revenue modeling and budgeting is combined with patient care data extracted from clinical workflow solutions to provide a unique, clinically focused analysis of organizational performance.
Siemens Medical Solutions
Decision Support Solutions
Siemens Decision Support is a suite of integrated applications that are designed exclusively for healthcare. Designed to support team-based decision-making on the healthcare management team, the solution’s need-specific modules offer timely views of performance against strategic metrics. Users can access clinical and financial reports and interactive analyses to help manage costs, increase productivity and improve quality of care. The Web-based dashboard monitors important business and clinical metrics to assure users are meeting organizational targets.
What distinguishes you from the competition? Siemens provides pre-built interfaces that transfer important operational clinical and financial data from the Health Information System into a Microsoft SQL database where end users can analyze, track and monitor organizational metrics. This information is updated on a daily basis and includes clinical information such as physician orders, nursing observations and laboratory results. Using a Web-based user interface, users can interact with the reports and analyses, and download them to their PCs.
Where are your R&D efforts to enhance your product within the next two years? Over the next two years, Siemens Decision Support Solutions will focus on developing new sources of data from niche solutions as well as integrating knowledge-based evaluation of best practices in the clinical setting. Real-time interfaces of operational data will be pursued as well. Automated engines that can evaluate dictated text reports and extract data into the decision support system are necessary as well.
Where is the opportunity to have greater use of clinical data in your system? We see the conjunction of all clinical data, from nursing observations to physician orders to dictated summaries and reports from ancillary services such as Radiology, Cardiology and Lab as critical to evaluating best practice in the clinical setting.