Customers

Oscar Lambret Cancer Center

Oscar Lambret Logo"The cost of BusinessObjects Edge is five times less than standard solutions and means that we can provide our 150 users with perfect visibility of their activities."

Didier Cauchois
IT Manager, Oscar Lambret Cancer Center - Lille

Challenge

Information about activities becomes essential

The Oscar Lambret Cancer Center in Lille was established in 1929 by Professor Oscar Lambret. The center now has 750 staff who provide specialist medical care for cancer patients, or carry out teaching and research work on cancer. Since 2004, in common with all other public health organizations in France, the Oscar Lambret Center is subject to the T2A activitybased payment regime. The Medical Information Department is responsible for collecting all of the activity data relating to patient care. On a monthly basis, the center has to supply all this data to its governing body, the Regional Hospitals Agency (RHA), for evaluation and payment and this constitutes the main funding that the hospital receives.

The accuracy of this information determines fair remuneration for the treatments they have carried out. This was the main reason why the Oscar Lambret Center wished to extend information access to all of the people involved to enable each individual to verify the data for their area and use this knowledge to improve their own activities. The migration to BusinessObjects Edge was carried out in several stages: BusinessObjects being purchased in 2005, followed by Crystal Decisions in 2006 and then migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 in 2007.

Approach

BusinessObjects Edge: the ideal solution for SMEs

When the PMSI (French hospitals information programme) was set up at the end of the 1990s, the Oscar Lambret Center was using several software applications: CEGI for patient records administration, Susie and an R2I Santé database for patients’ medical notes and storage of activity data. Returns to the RHA were performed by the Reference database software and returns to the Social Insurance scheme by CEGI; two different tools were being used to collect and supply information. Using SQL queries and a single BusinessObjects universe over the R2I applications, the processing and information flow chain was both restrictive and complicated. Faced with the ever-increasing frequency of the supply of information to the supervisory agencies, the Oscar Lambret Center decided to simplify its data collection and analysis tools by purchasing BusinessObjects in 2005 and Axya in 2006.

Meanwhile the scope of center’s needs was also expanding. Their primary objective was to access information in a more dynamic way to be able to make comparisons by time, for example: year, month, treatments, etc. and to be able to change the viewpoint whenever required. There was also a need to increase the user base. "Nowadays, when everyone is very aware of the need to provide high quality information, the very least we could do was to equip doctors with direct and secure access to their own activity data". Gestor, the time management application that was recently implemented required a new dedicated universe to be set up for an additional fifty users. "In all, we now have 150 users who are administrators, doctors, nurses and managers. Some of these users may only need two reports a month, so we were reluctant to invest in a standard solution", explains Didier Cauchois.

The BusinessObjects Edge suite which is intended for use by SMEs proved to be ideal. It is supplied as an information portal with access rights management for ten simultaneous users and a tools palette which includes a directory, management dashboards, encyclopedia etc. The purchase of Crystal Decisions went hand in hand with the migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2. With some basic in-house training, the 150 users at the Oscar Lambret Center can access a hundred reports, refreshed daily. They have full visibility of the data about their own activity levels and trends (number of operations performed in the operating unit in a given period, number of treatments of a particular specialism prescribed etc.). A dozen report designers have been trained by Keyrus, a Business Objects partner company.

Results

Better management of activities, budgets and resources

BusinessObjects reports are used to validate the quality of information sent to the supervisory bodies. Web Intelligence makes it quick and easy to distribute information that is adapted to the Center’s own needs. Downstream, the BusinessObjects reports equip the heads of department with a better understanding of their activities, from the activity indicators implemented by the Center. "The BusinessObjects Edge suite is perfectly suited to an SME organization like ours. It includes all the functionality we expected and builds on our BI investment in BusinessObjects", comments Didier Cauchois who goes on to talk about the future... "In the medical research field, you need to be able to interrogate, cross-reference and sort information. A medical datamart, in fact, why not? In the long term, a data warehouse would allow us to determine the best ratios between pricing of the activities we perform and their cost and would help us to improve management of activities, resources and our budget all at the same time".

Improved management methods now seem possible, thanks to cross-referencing of data on activity periods, medical specialisms, staff attendance rates, resource requirements, etc. "We don’t have to wait until the end of the year to discover whether a medical department’s activity is on the increase or falling. The Management Committee now monitor these kinds of indicators very closely. In future, they may influence our way of working with our environment". To mobilize additional resources for these future projects, Didier Cauchois is counting on the autonomy that users have gradually achieved, thanks to the simplicity of the Business Objects solutions. The Oscar Lambret Cancer Center is well prepared for 2008 and has all the tools it requires to achieve its objectives.

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