Business Objects Launches Activity Based Costing Solution for Healthcare

New Performance Management Application Integrates Financial and Patient Data to Develop Accurate Cost and Profitability Metrics across Clinical Service Lines

HFMA's Annual National Institute - ORLANDO - June 19, 2006 - Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ; Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the availability of BusinessObjects™ Activity Based Costing for Healthcare. Built using Business Objects planning technology, this new performance management application enables healthcare organizations to identify and analyze trends in key clinical and financial indicators across patient groups. Using these trends, healthcare organizations can more easily formulate strategies that drive improvements in operational and financial performance.

For healthcare organizations to plan effectively, they need a way to accurately assign costs, typically stored in summary form on their general ledger, to the specific tests and procedures used to care for patients. BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare delivers a sustainable framework for collecting and reporting timely, accurate, and reliable costing data. The solution helps organizations compute costs and margins on a per-patient basis to allow them to more easily analyze the information by physician, across service lines, or by HMO contract to identify trends in volume, cost, and margin.

This innovative application enables clinical managers to better understand and manage the costs associated with patient care, and provides healthcare executives with performance reporting and dashboards that support improved strategic and operational decision making. For example, a hospital network could use the application to identify that it is more cost-effective to service particular cardiac patients at a specialty clinic with comprehensive cardiac services, than it is at the main hospital. By shifting patients seen more regularly to these clinics, the healthcare network could save money while increasing the level of service it provides patients.

Activity Based Costing at Saint Mary's Health Care
Saint Mary's Health Care, which operates a network that includes 2,500 employees, a 324-bed hospital, and several centers for specialized care, has recently deployed BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing to help quantify the costs of providing services to patients. Using the Business Objects solution has put Saint Mary's Health Care on the right path to analyze trends in cost-per-care for each particular product line or patient population. With this information, administrators can work with physicians and staff to reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of care.

"There is a real need for activity based costing information in healthcare, but until now it was not widely available," said Dan Green, director of financial analysis and budget at Saint Mary's Health Care. "Using Business Objects, we now have a systematic and intuitive approach to gathering costing information, so we can spend more time implementing performance improvements. Business Objects allows everyone in our organization to do what we really want to do - give our patients something more."

Providing a Relevant, Trustworthy, and Insightful Activity Based Costing Solution
Many healthcare organizations find traditional activity based costing models difficult to implement and maintain. These models often produce too much detail, and accounting for changes an organization's processes, resource spending, or activities are extremely difficult. BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare is automated and easy to deploy, and helps to turn the most complex and detailed patient-level data into information that managers can use to make decisions.

Highlights of the new application include the ability to:

Effectively engage managers with an intuitive user interface and cost factor input screens
Easily update models to reflect changes in procedures, processes, or costs
Accurately calculate patient costs with flexible overhead allocation methods that support both traditional step-down and direct-to-patient allocations
Define service lines using any level of clinical and utilization detail
Perform utilization and margin analysis at multiple levels - by patient, service line, physician, and more
Leverage familiar formatting and graphing functions through sophisticated reporting capabilities that are fully integrated with Microsoft Excel

Cascade Healthcare Community, Inc., which operates as St. Charles Medical Center in Bend and Redmond, Oregon, is another early adopter of BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare. Cascade, which manages more than 265 hospital beds and 2,300 employees, wanted a solution that would simplify its cost accounting process while increasing trust in its costing results.

"Like every healthcare organization, we needed accurate costing data, and a costing model that our managers could easily understand and update," said Paul Henry, senior financial analyst at Cascade Healthcare Community. "If you don't understand your costing process and its methods, you risk creating numbers that lack management buy-in and are essentially unusable - causing the data to lose its value for strategic decision making. Business Objects delivered a solution that allowed us to improve our data analysis and deploy an online model that management trusts."

"The healthcare industry is under siege," said Jay Spence, director of healthcare industry solutions at Business Objects. "Costs continue to spiral out of control, while at the same time patients are often frustrated with slow moving processes and low quality of care. BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing helps healthcare organizations deal with these mounting challenges, and arms them with technology they can use to reduce costs while improving care. Our visionary healthcare customers, such as Saint Mary's and Cascade, are leading the way in driving positive change in this industry and are powerful examples of the impact our performance management applications can have on a healthcare organization."

Availability
BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare is available now. For more information and to view a demonstration of this solution, please visit Business Objects in booth 1011 at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's Annual National Institute in Orlando, Florida, from June 19-21. Additional information on the complete line of Business Objects planning and performance management solutions is available at www.businessobjects.com/planning/.

About Business Objects, an SAP company

Business Objects has been a pioneer in business intelligence (BI) since the dawn of the category. Today, as the world's leading BI software company, Business Objects transforms the way the world works through intelligent information. The company helps illuminate understanding and decision-making at more than 46,000 organizations around the globe. Through a combination of innovative technology, global consulting and education services, and the industry's strongest and most diverse partner network, Business Objects enables companies of all sizes to make transformative business decisions based on intelligent, accurate, and timely information.

Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company's stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.

Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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The Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Intelligent Question, and Xcelsius are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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