BI platform helps medical center chart performance

Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York is standardizing on a business intelligence (BI) platform for all its reporting needs, to help physicians and administrators run their practices more productively, provide high-quality care, and meet cost and performance standards.

Mount Sinai has used WebFOCUS from Information Builders for years, but is now expanding its use of that business intelligence platform with new BI dashboards and self-service analytic applications at the front lines. The medical center’s primary BI application targets an outpatient group of 1,000 physicians known as the Faculty Practice Associates. All of them have access to a WebFOCUS dashboard that provides information about growth, productivity and revenue recycle metrics, along with sophisticated analytic tools.

Gad Malamed, director of enterprise reporting at Mount Sinai Medical Center, says, “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. 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.”

Among its applications of the technology, Mount Sinai uses WebFOCUS to make it easier for hospital administrators and billing personnel to analyze charges. With the solution, for example, controllers recently identified more than $5 million in missed charges, re-billed for them and recovered close to $3 million in one year, Information Builders reported recently.

The hospital hopes to use Information Builders’ Integrated Health Intelligence (iHi) application suite and Performance Management Framework (PMF) for Healthcare. Those vertical BI applications link high-level strategy maps to quality of care objectives to make it easier to track such metrics as length of stay, readmits and insurance denials.