Redwood Solutions for Healthcare: Banner HealthReport2Web provides both strong security and easy access to critical report information.

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Banner Health is one of the largest nonprofi t healthcare systems in the United States. The system owns or manages 23 hospitals, long-term care services, and other facilities located in seven states. Banner Health operates across a vast area from Alaska to Arizona and employs over 35,000 people who care for more than 230,000 in-patients and 600,000 emergency room patients each year.

At A Glance

Industry

• Healthcare

Environment• Complex, heterogeneous

healthcare environment with a variety of supporting technologies

• Disparate systems serve a large group of users including accounting, patient fi nancial systems, managers and IT staff located across seven different states

Key Challenges• Analyze patient load, billing

and staffi ng needs to achieve a dynamic balance that maintains a fi nancially sustainable quality of care throughout the system

• Manage complex billing and payment systems

The Solution• Report2Web document storage

and distribution

Key Benefi ts• Easy access to critical staffi ng,

billing, and resource monitoring reports through the web-enabled archiving system

• Tight security for all documents and reports

• Smooth integration with existing report-producing software providing exactly the information hospital decision makers need without overwhelming them with data

• Easy to use, requiring little or no training for staff

• Signifi cant reduction in time and effort required to generate meaningful reports

Manual Effort with Minimal ResultsBanner is a nationally recognized healthcare leader. In 2010 Thomson Reuters cited the system as one of the Top 10 Health Systems and as a Top 10 Integrated Healthcare Network (IHN)™ by SDI. As it has grown, Banner Health demanded more from its IT resources to provide reports on clinical and fi nancial operations. Its original report distribution solution was simply not able to deliver on those demands. Previous document management systems produced mixed results. While these systems allowed them to produce reports around staffi ng, payment and resource use, the reports were very large and took too long for the system to generate. Once the reports were run, they required a great deal of manual effort to gather the critical information hospital leaders needed to make informed decisions on billing, staffi ng and other issues.

Because the reports took so long to run and required so much manual effort to be useful, they were often duplicated, emailed, and stored in several locations throughout the hospital’s network for use by multiple internal customers. For example, Accounting might have one copy of a report while human resources would keep another copy of the same report to use for their own purposes. This created a heavy and growing storage burden on Banner as well as serious concerns around version control and security.

With their old system, Banner could not enforce user-level security on reports. Aside from the obvious security issues, this also meant that every internal customer had to weed through thousands of reports to fi nd the vital information required for their role.

The issue of batch processed reports created even more latency in the system. As information came in late in the day, many reports would not be available for viewing until the following day. Sometimes it would take days for hospital managers to manually process this information to uncover trends or problems. This kind of latency was unacceptable to the healthcare system. They needed a better solution.

As the hospital grew, so did their frustration with their report management and distribution. New accounting staff, IT staff, department managers, patient fi nancial systems employees and others joined the ever-increasing universe of users. Each person requested his or her special reports, and with each new report, the system grew slower and more complex.

Bill BeaverIT Director, Enterprise Integration Services,Banner Health

“ We looked at Report2Web and we saw exactly what we needed.

“

Report2Web: Fast, Intuitive and Secure Banner sought to simplify and automate the increasingly complex, resource-intensive environment that was growing around them. With Report2Web, all of the features they needed were built right in.

“The email notifi cations are especially useful and powerful. Each time we generate a report, users receive an email with a link directly to the piece of the report they need–no more emailing enormous reports all over the system,” explains Beaver. “Not only does this accelerate our processing time, but it also saves space and bandwidth by storing reports in one place and providing access for departments rather than storing multiple copies in multiple locations.”

Report2Web provides an intuitive, easy to use, web-based interface. With more than 400 users throughout the company, ease of use was a critical factor. “When we add a new user, we just email their credentials with a brief training presentation, and they are ready to use Report2Web,” explains Beaver. “Extensive training is not necessary. That saves on cost and time.”

The security model delivers access control based on facility, individual report and/or cost center. Not only does this provide the essential security required by Banner, it also gives people the specifi c information they need for their specifi c role. Users no longer have to wade through pages of irrelevant data to fi nd exactly what they need.

With Report2Web, Banner now captures documents from any platform or application – healthcare or otherwise – including Adobe® PDFs and fl at fi les. This information can then be automatically burst, bundled, and secured in custom reports. Indexing rules ensure rapid retrieval while building a comprehensive audit trail for all documents.

Growing TogetherThe organization has had Report2Web in production for more than two years, and has since added two new facilities. Processing 175,000 raw reports in an average month, they rely heavily on the advanced bursting functionality of Report2Web. Banner also uses Report2Web to convert report information into alternate formats, such as Microsoft Excel®. Users throughout the healthcare system have access to exactly the information they need in a format they can use. Accounting can pull detail or aggregated payment information from wherever they wish and then quickly and easily analyze that information with Excel, a tool they use every day. Staffi ng and payroll can do the same.

“Banner has more than 6,000 unique reports,” says Beaver. “We currently have more than seven million reports in our system. That’s equivalent to 24,000 four-drawer fi ling cabinets. This many fi ling cabinets would fi ll 1.3 football fi elds, without the end zones. We needed a powerful solution to handle this information and make it useful to us – and we have it.”

Banner uses Report2Web to combine information from MS4, Lawson, Eclipsys®, and BMC’s Control-D, to unify business, healthcare and IT data into a single reporting platform.

Redwood is a registered trademark and Cronacle and Report2Web are trademarks of Redwood Software. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identifi cation purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

© Redwood Software 2011 All rights reserved. www.redwood.com

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The ease of customizing reports in Report2Web resulted in tremendous time savings. Now Banner can automatically create custom packages for its end users and apply business rules to extract totals from specifi c reports. Managers can focus on analyzing the totals rather than fi nding them. They no longer drown in data. “This ability saves us immeasurable time. If the totals are correct, managers often don’t need to see the detail,” says Beaver. “If the totals are incorrect, managers can quickly obtain that detail and investigate.”

As Banner continues to improve their system and processes with Report2Web, they plan to expand their implementation to electronically notify physicians when documents are needed or received, decommission additional legacy software, and minimize network traffi c. “We want to allow end users to publish non-production reports to Report2Web rather than emailing multiple copies to groups of individuals,” says Beaver. “Not only is this more effi cient, it will also help keep us collaborative and accurate.”

For Banner, Report2Web is not just an improvement, it’s a solution. It provides the organization with a system to enforce security and make critical information available when and where it’s needed. Report2Web offers the fl exibility and power to handle high volumes of sensitive information quickly and effi ciently. As Banner Health continues to grow, they can focus on providing world-class healthcare while their report management system grows right along with them.

“ We needed a powerful solution to handle this information and make it useful to us – and we have it..

“