Business Intelligence
Solution Set
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Data Exchange
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Goal Achieved! Dreyer's New Data Warehouse Empowers Users to Make Informed Decisions
"Data Exchange pretty much runs itself and the application sends an automated email out if there are any ETL issues."
Fred Nelson, CFO at Dreyer
The Client
Dreyer Medical Clinic's dedication to providing the most progressive and cost-effective healthcare keeps them on the technological leading edge, seeking best-practices for reducing overhead and streamlining operations. As such, their recent business intelligence initiative focused on delivering quickly accessible and dependable data to facilitate timely and accurate reporting. The Clinic serves 12 locations in 7 Fox Valley, Illinois communities. Their staff is comprised of over 125 physicians covering 26 specialties and 1,000 support staff.
The Challenge
Dreyer's practice management system consists of a number of IDX modules: SCHED, BAR, AES, DBMS, MCA, PCS, TES. Their existing data management solution was labor-intensive to mine and manipulate and lacked a standard reporting solution. To report from the MCA data, AES and DBMS queries were used. As a result, data retrieval relied upon communication between users and programmers, instead of one automated, tightly integrated system. Dreyer's need for a new solution was driven primarily by the desire for timely, accurate financial and analytical reporting. The new software had to be useful in quickly determining physician productivity and managed care analysis.
Fred Nelson, the then newly-hired CFO at Dreyer, was knowledgeable about the variety of ETL and reporting products on the market from his experiences at other healthcare organizations. Prior to joining Dreyer, he'd overseen the development of proprietary solutions, worked with known industry products, and was familiar with the complexity and functionality of the SQL environment. His new organization was intent on employing best-of-breed products to efficiently deliver the most accurate intelligence.
The Solution
The course of action included implementing a data warehouse and selecting a business intelligence solution. A large number of business intelligence and data warehousing initiatives fail due to erroneous, incomplete, or untimely data. Inexperienced organizations often ignore the importance of developing a focused data management strategy for extract, transform, and load with a single integrated data warehouse architecture. Well aware of this, Nelson contacted Global Works with an interest in Global Works Data ExchangeTM.
Data Exchange provides an automated means of extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) detailed client datasets from the practice management system and accurately synchronizes them with the relational database. Data Exchange is simple to install, implement, and use. Existing staff can operate and maintain the data warehouse environment without any special training. The ETL is fully automated, allowing for hands-off extraction and loading.
"Data Exchange pretty much runs itself and the application sends an automated email out if there are any ETL issues," confirms Fred.
With ETL requirements for IDX BAR, MCA, SCHED, and TES met by Data Exchange, Dreyer selected Practice Diagnostic Systems (PDS) Medical Enterprise Information System (MEIS) business intelligence solution and had both GWS and PDS deliver a single integrated solution.
PDS MEIS is an industry best-practice data warehouse, decision support software tool, and streamlined implementation methodology for the healthcare enterprise. The product uses data marts based on multiple data sources drawn from billing, managed care, claims, scheduling, benchmarks, and other systems.
Designed with end-users in mind, MEIS leverages the leading-edge decision support software from Cognos, empowering users to analyze and query their data for decision-making. The practice management system data, in concert with Microsoft SQL database and Cognos business intelligence software, integrated into one seamless tool. Because organizational needs constantly change, MEIS provides a flexible foundation for delivering the required information.
Having never worked with Cognos the way PDS delivers it, Nelson was "astounded that what used to take hours with traditional report query tools can now be achieved in minutes."
The Implementation
The strategic partnership shared by Global Works and PDS not only allows for a solution that's seamlessly integrated, but also lets the implementation teams operate as one "virtual company." Global Works' understanding of data structure coupled with PDS' knowledge of data modeling and staging result in an end-to-end turnkey data warehouse and reporting environment.
As both teams in concert with the Dreyer worked on the detailed specification for the enhanced data modeling, Global Works Senior Software Engineer Mark (Oscar) Ocskasy developed scripts to create and update the "derived tables." Some of the individual data marts Dreyer chose to create include: financial transactions, productivity, invoice lag, reimbursement, appointment scheduling, managed care, and marketing.
Dreyer was pleased with the completed implementation. "Oscar is absolutely amazing! His understanding of the mechanics of the data both in Mumps and SQL is excellent," affirms Nelson.
He also mentions that everyone he'd worked with at PDS "from pre-sale, through project management, training, and support has been simply outstanding!"
The Results
Dreyer's decision-makers now have a tremendous amount of information at their fingertips. Users are empowered to produce the reports they need. With this intelligence, Fred and his team have been able to achieve impressive reductions in overhead. Some examples of the reports they're producing include: Work RVUs (Provider Productivity), Pended Aging Claims, E&M Coding Distribution, Visit Reports, Drug Reimbursement, Collection Rates, Trending of Paid Claims for Managed Care.
The measure of a business intelligence solution is how well it delivers the means to make the best decisions for an enterprise's well-being. In the case of Dreyer Medical Clinic, it appears that the Global Works and PDS Partnership scores high marks.
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