NGS Releases Business Intelligence for Health Care Industry

Published: April 4, 2006

by Mary Lou Roberts

Few industries have a greater reliance on current and accurate data than healthcare. Hospital administrators, clinic accounting departments, nursing staffs, and patients alike want to know that the organization has access to the best and most current information possible.

To meet this need, NewGeneration Software has announced the NGS Healthcare Data Mart and Analytical Reporting Solution that runs on the iSeries. This new tool provides reports, dashboards, spreadsheets, and Web presentations to monitor hospital and clinic financial, clinical, performance, and quality measures.

According to Betty Vernon, NGS healthcare solutions manager, healthcare professionals today are "under tremendous pressure to use their human resources more effectively and to improve quality, but they often lack the financial means to license and implement a data warehousing and analytical reporting solution."

Mary Lynn Treadwell, NGS marketing communications manager, adds, "Some hospitals are still using IBM Query, which lacks functionality and ease of use. In addition, some have looked at other solutions that are very expensive and require a lot of manpower to implement. For small- to medium-sized organizations that don't have that kind of budget, the NGS Healthcare Data Mart and Analytical Reporting Solution gives them a tool that they can implement quickly and cost-effectively."

The system runs on the iSeries and can be integrated with any iSeries-based hospital and clinic business software. In addition, customers of the Siemens MedSeries4 software can also license an extended edition of the system that includes a set of real-time dashboards and reports that are built directly over the MedSeries4 database. These reports and presentations include admission and discharge tracking, room and bed status, length of stay, charges, and patient census information.

In order to generate these reports, users simply click on an icon for data output to Microsoft Excel and Access, Acrobat PDF, drillable HTML, multi-dimensional and graphical presentations from NGS-IQ's SmartView OLAP module, or interactive Web dashboards created with the NGS Business Performance Dashboard. Outputs are generated from a DB2 UDB-based data mart that can be maintained and customized using the NGS-IQ business intelligence and data warehousing software.

Security is, of course, an important element in access to healthcare data. This has been a consideration in the design of the system. And, while NGS' optional security module, SeQure, will not be bundled into the standard solution, it will be bundled into the customized solution for the Siemens MedSeries4 users.

Treadwell estimates the healthcare market represents approximately 10 percent of the iSeries installed base. However, in terms of dollars, healthcare continues to grow at a faster pace than most other market segments, putting additional pressure on healthcare organizations to contain costs and make better use of the data they have.

While NGS has not released specific pricing information for this product, Treadwell reports that pricing is based on the customer's P-group.