By Jennifer Reber

About four years ago, in an effort to streamline their productivity and achieve cross-application reporting, Sansum Clinic, headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, began implementing the Business Intelligence (BI) and Clinical Intelligence (CI) design tools of Precision.BI, LLC, (PBI).

The company’s primary focus at that time included data from the Billing and Scheduling applications of GE Centricity Business, formerly IDX Flowcast, explained Sansum IT Analyst, Monica Turner. She said they were having difficulty accomplishing tasks through DBMS, which is GE Centricity Business’s report writer, because the software required further data manipulation in a third party toolset. Looking ahead, they knew they wanted the ability to readily deliver data directly to management. 

Turner said the organization had just converted to GE Centricity Business in 2006 from a relatively home-grown system. Because of this, she said the IT department had little experience using the DBMS report writer. 

“PBI offered a solution by being a tool that is easy to use in terms of creating reports,” she said. “Essentially writing SQL logic with click and drag functionality.”  

Today the implementation of PBI has been credited with helping Sansum not only meet, but surpass their initial goal of creating a dashboard for executive management. They’ve recently found success in the creation of a custom report they’ve termed the “Physician Dashboard.”

“It’s emailed directly to the provider and contains a monthly snapshot of their schedule accessibility and billing versus budget goals,” Turner said of the Dashboard.

Additionally, she said they’ve created numerous other “smaller” reports that, while not as visible as the “Physician Dashboard,” are equally as valuable. These reports give the Clinics the ability to meet the day-to-day needs of their department heads and managers and Turner and her colleagues the ability to monitor and improve their processes.

Now, said Turner, the vast majority of GE Centricity Business reports are produced from PBI rather than DBMS.

Within the past year, Sansum has added GE Centricity Business’s Managed Care application to their ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process. Doing so will allow them to create reports through PBI that are based on the Managed Care data.   

Besides enabling Sansum Clinic to meet their BI and CI goals, Turner said Precision.BI has also significantly impacted the lives of its IT reporting analysts.

“A PBI report runs in a fraction of the time it would take in DBMS,” said Turner. “If we had to rely on DBMS alone, our IT shop would never meet our deadlines in terms of report requests.”

Another big win in using PBI is the variable output options. There’s no need to pretty up the output before delivery to the requestor, Turner said, because the user can now format the report in PBI. And now, scheduling report jobs gives the analysts time to concentrate on new requests.

“In many respects, for the average report request, PBI is quick, easy, reliable,” said Turner.

About Sansum Clinic

Sansum Clinic is one of Santa Barbara County’s oldest and largest nonprofit medical foundations providing advanced technology and a quality environment for the best possible practice of medicine. They contract with over 140 staff physicians practicing more than 30 specialties at their multi-specialty clinics and specialty clinics from Carpinteria to Lompoc regions. Visit them online at www.sansumclinic.org.