NGS Delivers Prebuilt BI for Healthcare

New Generation Software (NGS) has delivered yet another addition to its Decision Assist line of prebuilt business intelligence (BI) applications for various industries. With Decision Assist–Healthcare, NGS is enabling hospitals and other healthcare organizations that rely upon the System i server to quickly set up dashboards, portals, multidimensional models, and other elements of a BI solution that would normally take a considerable amount of development.

While the market for ERP software is not expected to increase as quickly in 2008 as it did in previous years, there are some IT industry pockets that are forecasted to improve. BI and CRM tools are two areas that should buck the trend and put up decent numbers in 2008, according to a recent analysis by AMR Research.

That’s good news for companies like NGS, which makes its living creating and selling BI tools and solutions that are geared toward System i shops. Lately, the trend in the BI market has been shunning the highly complex and expensive “big bang” BI roll-outs in favor of smaller-scale, more highly targeted deployments that can deliver real value and provide a quick return.

In NGS’ case, this approach has materialized with its Decision Assist line of products, which aim to get customers started with BI while not overwhelming them with complexity. The software does this by providing tools that help the IT staff and programmers implement a powerful BI environment, while at the same time providing a series of reports targeting consumers of BI–the managers, salesmen, and executives who make the business decisions. These reports are generated as Web-based dashboards, PDFs, or Excel spreadsheets, making it easier for them to consume the data generated by the BI software.

NGS has already made several Decision Assist announcements this year, including the July launch of Decision Assist–Financial Performance, which provides CFOs and financial analysts the capability to spawn various financial reports, and the October launch of Decision Assist–Business Performance, which is tailored toward distributors.

In late November, NGS aimed its Decision Assist train at the healthcare industry with the launch of Decision Assist–Healthcare, which helps System i-using businesses–including community hospitals, clinics, and even software vendors– set up their BI environments.

It’s the report-generating capabilities that make Decision Assist products special, and the new Healthcare product is loaded with them, including several preconfigured, Flash-based dashboards that are viewable through a Web browser. Decision-makers at hospitals can see the number of admissions indexed by the day of the week or by patient type; the number of patient visits by doctors; the amount of revenue (or expected revenue) generated by certain types of patients; the average length of stay; among several other metrics.

Decision Assist–Healthcare has the capacity to help hospitals be more profitable and take better care of their patients, says Bernard Gough, president and CEO of NGS. “We know community hospitals are under tremendous pressure to meet their financial and patient care quality goals,” Gough says. “With Decision Assist–Healthcare, they gain insight into their performance in ways not previously possible so they can quickly and cost-effectively achieve these goals.”

Like all Decision Assist products, the new Decision Assist–Healthcare offerings include a license to NGS’ flagship i5/OS-based NGS-IQ server, as well as licenses to its Windows-based development tools, preconfigured Web portals, performance dashboards, and multidimensional models. It also includes a predefined DB2/400 data mart.

The software is designed to hook into any popular i5/OS-based healthcare information system. NGS has previously worked with Siemens Medical Solutions‘ popular i5/OS-based MedSeries4 application, and offers a version of Decision Assist tailored to that specific environment. For integrating with other products, NGS offers training for end-user organizations as well as software vendors in the healthcare industry.

Decision Assist–Healthcare works with OS/400 V5R1 and higher. For more information, visit www.ngsi.com.

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