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USF Health Asks the Right Questions with Business Objects


"BusinessObjects changed our processes and what we're able to do. We can get answers now to questions we didn't even think to ask."

Sidney Fernandes
assistant CIO and director, application development
USF Health

CHALLENGE

Associated with the University of South Florida (USF), USF Health is composed of three colleges (for public health, nursing, and medicine), two schools (for physical therapy and biomedical sciences), and a physicians' group. Founded in 1965, USF Health is concerned with the full continuum of health for individuals, the community, and the wider environment.

USF Health IT, the information technology arm of USF Health, supports the consulting, design, development, and administration of applications for the various groups and facilities at USF Health. Sidney Fernandes, assistant CIO and director of application development at USF Health IT, says, "We develop business intelligence (BI) solutions that support the research, educational, healthcare, and administrative functions of USF Health."

USF Health needed a way of consolidating information and providing greater visibility into financials, physician performance, educational, and research data. With a range of separately maintained data sources, including Excel spreadsheets and assorted financial and clinical databases distributed throughout the organization, USF Health sought to establish a BI reporting, and analysis system that would integrate its numerous data systems, consolidate information, and provide the hard-hitting analysis executives require for making effective business decisions.

Fernandes explains, "Our overall vision is to consolidate information – like salary and income statements, or physician and clinician performance – into single reporting structures, so decision-makers get a wholesale view of the data." To facilitate decision-making, USF Health sought to develop reports and dashboards that would enable executives to view the status of various concerns at a glance, as well as be able to drill down on charts and graphs to see what's behind the data. For example, decision-makers wanted to be able to track clinical effort to performance, to understand how clinical effort impacts revenue. With data scattered across the organization, USF Health needed a BI solution to bring all the pieces together.

APPROACH

When choosing a BI reporting solution, USF Health considered vendors based on feature sets and vertical integration of reporting and ETL tools. Once universes were set up, Business Objects, an SAP company, was able to create reports in minutes, compared to the months it would take on legacy systems. Jim McKenzie, assistant VP of information technologies and CIO at USF Health, says, "The speed of development tells you how sophisticated a tool BusinessObjects™ Enterprise is. You can create high-quality work within a matter of days or hours."

Business Objects Global Services consulted with USF Health for its initial BI and data warehouse design. Fernandes says, "Business Objects helped us with a lot of the architecture in the beginning." McKenzie adds, "Although we worked with a local Business Objects consultant, we found that while they were good, using Business Objects itself and its consultant division directly was a far superior way to go."

USF Health uses BusinessObjects Data Integrator to pull data from different sources, and BusinessObjects Dashboard Builder to create executive dashboards. USF Health has created clinical dashboards, financial dashboards, asset distribution dashboards, and a wide range of other applications, typically viewed by USF Health VPs, department chairs, and administrators.

Each of the dashboards integrates data from multiple sources, and enables decision-makers to drill down on the details behind the data. Fernandes says, "Within a year of deploying BusinessObjects, we were able to incorporate about 10 different sources systems in our data warehouse. We created individual data marts for our source systems, and then aggregated them up together as we went along. Today, the data warehouse incorporates 17 different source systems."

RESULTS

The results have been spectacular. Fernandes says, "Business Objects was able to understand our processes and see that in order to get complete answers, we had to touch 10 or more different systems." He adds, "It was very important to us to prove to our decision-makers that consolidation was actually possible, because there was a lot of skepticism – they wondered, 'Is it actually possible to get all the data together?' Within six months, we had an initial design, including six source systems, available for reporting."

Reporting benefits quickly dissipated any doubts among financial staff. McKenzie says, "When we started the project, some of the financial staff felt threatened in terms of job security. Now, most of them love the BI data warehouse because things that would take a month to do now take only seconds. And because they've learned this, they feel they have more job security rather than less. In fact, USF Health has hired more people, and the status of the financial people has increased. Their credibility has increased, and their value to the organization has increased because we tied all this data together."

Transforming the Way People Work

Fernandes and McKenzie both agree that the BusinessObjects solution has been transformational in terms of information USF Health is now able to access, the way IT can accomplish reporting, and even employee behavior. "BusinessObjects changed our processes and what we're able to do," says Fernandes. "We can get answers now to questions we didn't even think to ask."

For example, pulling data from multiple sources into one consolidated dashboard, USF Health can now assess clinical efforts and view billings and collections for individual doctors for a fiscal year, along with relative value units (RVUs), a guideline commonly used for assessing physician productivity. "Our decision-makers want to see information based on the clinical effort of a given doctor, such as the charges, collections, and RVUs," says Fernandes. The dashboard shows decision-makers exactly how physicians are doing in terms of their scheduling and overhead. Executives can look at the top performing current procedural terminology (CPT) codes by count, and the top 10 charges for CPT codes, and similar reports. Fernandes says, "The consolidated BusinessObjects dashboard really was the first time administration could look at a doctor's pay over multiple pay sources."

Having that kind of insight enables USF Health to track the effectiveness of its team and also to give physicians and clinicians quantifiable feedback regarding performance. Fernandes explains, "A lot of the physicians are excited to see the RVUs on a daily basis. They were used to getting a report once a month, and now they can see where they're at or where they're going on a daily basis, and where they are compared to the benchmarks. And also which CPT codes made money for them."

The new integration capabilities changed USF Health's reporting processes as well as behavior. "A lot of the data was being stored in Excel spreadsheets, with no integration," says McKenzie. "Our application developers discovered issues that had not been examined until we did this project. Initially, questions came up and the answers often were, 'That's the way we've always done it.' Now, as people have seen the possibilities and the results of creating dashboards and reporting on consolidated information, that attitude has changed."

Highlighting Performance and Opportunities Through Dashboards

USF Health has produced numerous dashboards, enabling decision-makers to drill down and produce ad hoc reports as needed. Departmental dashboards show department chairs information about faculty that report to them – the number of ranked faculty, non-ranked faculty, the effort and distribution for the department, and the resources available for and expended by the department. Fernandes says, "Before this dashboard, the department chair couldn't figure out how much money was available. Now, the chair can see how much was spent on what category, such as travel and office supplies, and what's left for the department."

An instructional dashboard gives department chairs information about the courses a physician teaches, how many students attended each course, how the students evaluated each course and the instructor, and other information of interest to administrative decision-makers. A research dashboard highlights the efforts physicians put into clinical and basic science research, including grants and funding, and helps department chairs see how well doctors are doing based on the effort they're expending on research. Ultimately, USF Health anticipates that such reports will change individual behavior – and to a certain extent, it already has. "No one wants to be an outlier," says McKenzie. "When someone sees their performance is outside the norm, they want to know what they can do to get better. The aggregated data helps change their behavior."

"Our executives are excited about what we're now able to do – although 'excitement' is really understating it," says McKenzie. "They've often talked about transformational leadership. Our BusinessObjects initiative was touted as one of the key activities this entire enterprise did last year to demonstrate leadership, to become leaders in the academic medical community. We've really broken brand new ground here."

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