Mount Sinai Medical Center, a 1,171-bed hospital affiliated with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has deployed business intelligence software to get its arms around key financial measures and boost performance management reporting.
For years, Mount Sinai's IT personnel have depended on Information Builders WebFOCUS to provide critical business intelligence for financial and operational reports. The organization is now standardizing on WebFOCUS for all of its reporting needs, with new BI dashboards and self-service analytic applications at the front lines. The new BI and performance management environment will help physicians deliver high quality care while adhering to institution-wide cost and performance standards.
When it comes to making transformational changes at a hospital, the most important people to engage are the physicians and medical staff, since they have the largest impact on overall care as well as on a hospital's ability to be profitable, Mount Sinai officials said.
Mount Sinai's primary BI application targets an outpatient group of 1,000 physicians known as Faculty Practice Associates (FPA), who have access to a WebFOCUS dashboard that provides information about growth, productivity and revenue cycle metrics along with sophisticated analytic tools. Physicians and administrators use the dashboard to run their practices more productively.
"Without implementing a comprehensive framework for managing performance there is no easy way to incorporate operational effectiveness and efficiency into the institution's overall goals," said Gad Malamed, director of enterprise reporting at Mount Sinai. "With WebFOCUS, we've gotten our arms around some key financial measures. Now we plan to expand to clinical and operational measures so we can analyze recurring costs and pinpoint cause-and-effect relationships."
Other departments are using WebFOCUS to streamline business operations. The finance group uses WebFOCUS Active Reports to dissect, analyze and filter information into specific cost centers and create charts.
Mount Sinai is also using WebFOCUS to make it easier for hospital administrators and billing personnel to analyze charges. Controllers recently identified more than $5 million in missed charges, re-billed for them and recouped close to $3 million in a single year.
Hospital officials hope to soon use Information Builders' Integrated Health Information (iHi) Application Suite and Performance Management Framework (PMF) for Healthcare, which includes a predefined data model to streamline the creation of metrics, scorecards, dashboards and roles. These vertical BI applications link high-level strategy maps to quality of care objectives to make it easier to track metrics such as length of stay, HIM-coding quality, readmits and insurance denials. PMF for Healthcare will enrich the performance management environment; iHi will provide a detailed data model down to the patient level to formulate more granular metrics.
Phong Bui, the business owner for the business intelligence project, said the FPA Dashboard would also help Mount Sinai uncover root-cause issues and instigate targeted improvement initiatives. Ultimately this increased transparency will enforce greater accountability among the medical staff.
"Wide distribution of the dashboard has allowed for greater engagement of our physicians in the business of the clinical practices and will enhance performance," said Bui. "Making this information available internally helps us know what is going on within the hospital."
"The U.S. healthcare industry is undergoing intensive scrutiny with healthcare reform debates revealing the need for greater transparency, accountability and performance among providers," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "With the WebFOCUS BI platform, Mount Sinai and other medical institutions and businesses have the ability to gather, analyze and resolve information management issues and enforce strategic business priorities without compromising on care."