Customers

Emergency Medical Associates

Emergency Medical Associates"BusinessObjects XI R2 creates an environment where users are not required to be tech-savvy to retrieve business intelligence and performance management data. With XI R2, we’re able to provide a superior product at a lower delivery cost. How often do you see that?"

Jonathan Rothman
director of data management
EMA

Challenge: Meet Growing Need for Security, Capacity, and Scalability

Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) is a group of more than 250 board-certified emergency physicians who are contracted to manage and staff emergency departments at 17 hospitals in New York and New Jersey. EMA physicians treat up to 2,000 emergency patients per day, and more than 700,000 each year.

To effectively manage the emergency departments for which they're responsible, EMA physicians need access to a wide range of clinical, operational, financial, and satisfaction metrics. For example, they need to know whether their emergency department operations are functioning efficiently. They need to understand costs associated with providing patient care and their correlation to outcomes. Physicians also need access to patient satisfaction data to identify opportunities for improvement. And since much of physician compensation is directly tied to individual site metrics, it's vital that physicians understand their performance relative to various key performance indicators.

"Our physicians and managers are busy doing what they do best: taking care of patients," says Jonathan Rothman, director of data management for EMA. "They need information that's easy to access and understand without requiring end-users to be tech-savvy. My team's objective is to create analytics and information displays that help end-users identify relationships between groups of data, and to enable physicians to make sense of - and make decisions based on - the displayed results."

Until recently, EMA relied on BusinessObjects 6.5 for its business intelligence (BI) activities. "At that time, our environment had about 95 users," says Rothman. "And though we were happy overall with the system's performance, we did face some challenges."

First, security concerns meant EMA felt limited as to what information it could share with non-EMA physicians and staff. "Protecting the security of healthcare data is vital, and we're required to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Emergency departments need information to meet mandatory reporting requirements and to compare their performance with their peer groups. And while EMA had the necessary information, security concerns meant we did not feel comfortable allowing non-EMA physicians and employees direct access to web-based metrics."

Rothman says users also complained that, when they used scorecards to display performance management data, they were only able to drill down to one report at a time. To increase user satisfaction and adoption rates, EMA wanted to further simplify analytics analysis and enhance its BI system's capacity and scalability.

Approach: Migrate from BusinessObjects 6.5 to XI Release 2

After learning about the features and benefits of BusinessObjects XI Release 2, Rothman was impressed with the platform's stability, the increased functionality of Web Intelligence and other tools, enhanced security features, and the concept of one central management console administering the entire infrastructure. Working with trusted Business Objects partner Kanbay (formerly Adjoined Consulting), Rothman demonstrated the benefits of XI Release 2 to EMA, and the company decided to migrate to the new system.

Together, Rothman and Kanbay created a test environment to familiarize themselves with XI Release 2, without affecting EMA's existing system. "Working with Kanbay provided the people power we needed to make the migration happen," says Rothman. "My team was able to continue with its day-to-day work while Kanbay completed the migration behind the scenes. And because we maintained a 6.5 environment until XI R2 was up and running, we were able to switch over without losing much productivity."

Results: Increased Physician Usage and Satisfaction, Reduced Costs

EMA's migration from BusinessObjects 6.5 to XI Release 2 was completed in February 2006. Since then, Rothman says, user adoption has increased dramatically because of the new platform's simplicity, functionality, stability, and speed.

"BusinessObjects XI R2 simply provides a better user experience," says Rothman. "We're finding document management much easier than with previous versions. And migrating to XI R2 has solved a lot of the problems and complaints I used to receive." With dashboards that graphically display results against targets and thresholds, doctors and other managers can view patient-care metrics and track business metrics - such as patient billing efficiency and progress against financial targets. The physicians' individual performance metrics are also displayed in dashboards on their browsers, allowing them to review their pay status and compare their performance with targets.

Rothman says the dashboard of XI Release 2 looks, feels, and functions even better than before, and it operates more like a traditional Web page. "The analytics look much cleaner, and we love the thermometers. My team can easily set up multiple drill downs, and the front page of each hospital’s dashboard becomes a launching pad for all other data, reports, and analytics."

Both Rothman and EMA end-users love the new Web Intelligence features. "It's a breath of fresh air," says Rothman, "not just for the end-user, but also from the designer's perspective. Once we started using XI R2 Web Intelligence, we wondered how we ever managed with the previous versions."

EMA also appreciates XI Release 2's enhanced security features. "The new version provides better application-specific security that allows or disallows functionality within Web Intelligence, Full Client, and the dashboard gadgets," says Rothman. "I'm now completely comfortable releasing individualized dashboards to non-EMA physicians who manage the emergency departments at our contracted sites, since I can restrict the activities and access of individual users. Hospital administrators can sign in and retrieve the information they need. And the cost of providing services to these clients has decreased dramatically - plus we're in full compliance with HIPAA."

Even factoring system and migration costs, EMA expects both its per-visit costs and percentage of revenue costs for 2006 to decline as a result of the migration. And with the improved ability to understand and measure their performance against pre-defined targets and thresholds, the 250+ EMA physicians are in a better position to improve emergency department operations, their own earning power, and the bottom line for contracted hospitals. "But most importantly, having better metrics at their fingertips helps our physicians provide better care to our patients. And isn’t that what this is really all about?"

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