Instant, secure access to cost effective reports empowers hospital decision-makers

Company Overview

Proudly serving the Nashville community since 1919, Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital is the largest non-profit community hospital in Middle Tennessee. The hospital is recognized for its women’s services, neurosciences, orthopedics, cardiology, oncology, minimally invasive surgery and joint replacement.

Business Challenges

Every month, the managers at Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital found it took far too long to sift and search through the thousands of pages printed and distributed by the organization’s data center.

During the closing period, the finance department had to manually analyze, split, and convert data for the day’s general reports. The daily general reports were then printed and distributed, and the finance team disposed of the previous day’s massive printouts.

“Manually decollating, sorting, packaging and delivering the financial reports used to require two to three days,” said Jim Drew, IT manager.

Simply distributing the monthly accounting and payroll reports took one employee three to four hours.

Aside from the time and resources required for report analysis, sectioning, bundling, printing and distribution, Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital also faced significant risk due to the likelihood of manual errors.

In addition, manually managing and tracking that data to consistently meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance requirements was a constant concern.

Initially, data and reports were handled, distributed, and archived via the hospital’s intranet and various tools. However, in the long run, this strategy decreased productivity and may have added to the associated costs rather than containing them.

Solution

Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital selected Redwood Reporting to simplify its report distribution challenge.

“Electronic reporting based on current browser technology that didn’t require the installation of any dedicated client software was a must,” said Drew. “My IT team also selected Redwood for its ease-of-use, intuitiveness of administration, and reasonable price.”

Results

More than 200 users, from vice presidents and department managers to administrative assistants, across 50+ departments, rely on Redwood Reporting.  “Redwood Reporting has become a core part of our daily business and has certainly met our operational needs,” said Mike Newman, Vice President of IT. “It has fulfilled the ROI specifications we established, and it is playing an important role in our HIPAA compliance.”

Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital employees recognize that intuitive, user-friendly Redwood Reporting gives all authorized users instant, easy access to the approximately 3,000 new documents that are added monthly as well as the tens of thousands of documents published annually. “With Redwood Reporting, our business decision-makers can quickly and easily find the information they need to do their daily work,” said Drew. “Redwood Reporting automatically collects, decollates and publishes output from multiple enterprise applications into single, logical folders.”

The system’s security and control over sensitive information, as well as its ability to track who accessed the document and when continues to play a key role in the hospital’s HIPAA-Readiness program. “Because Redwood Reporting supports a wide range of systems and applications, we’re able to securely manage information distribution across our entire hospital,” said Newman.

Redwood Reporting collects and manages output from many enterprise applications, including but not limited to patient accounting, finance, materials management, payroll and other applications that run on IBM mainframe and AIX servers. The data is catalogued in a secure data repository and distributed to authorized end-users electronically. “Delivery time is virtually instantaneous,” said Newman.

The finance department’s processes are significantly improved with Redwood Reporting. Month-end reports are now automatically published and secured in the Redwood Reporting repository as soon as they’re generated. Team members can access the reports online any time to see recent, accurate month-end information.

Redwood Reporting provides the required functionality and ease of use, delivers process and resource efficiencies, and supports HIPAA compliance and continues to meet Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital’s needs and expectations.