Healthcare system automates report distribution and archiving to improve decision-making

Company Overview

One of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the U.S., Banner Health is based in Phoenix, Arizona and operates in six states. Banner owns and operates 30 hospitals as well as Banner Health Network, Banner University Medicine, academic and employed physician groups, long-term care centers, outpatient surgery centers and an array of other services, including Banner Urgent Care, family clinics, home care and hospice services, pharmacies, and a nursing registry.

Business Challenge

Banner’s manual report processing and storage system was incredibly time- and resource inefficient. It was also the source of serious version control and security concerns and hampered employees’ ability to quickly and effectively identify trends and make timely, strategic business decisions.

Every month, Banner’s 400 users manually processed 175,000 raw reports and the organization managed and stored 7 million paper reports across its various network locations.

The resulting storage burden was immense — the equivalent of 24,000 four-drawer filing cabinets filling 1.3 football fields. A storage burden that was expected to grow over time.

Banner’s more than 6,000 daily unique reports were often duplicated and emailed to multiple internal customers. After these reports had been run and distributed, employees had to manually search and sort through thousands of reports to find the information they needed to do their jobs.

It could take employees days to process and locate the reports and information they required, so trends and issues weren’t always identified and addressed as quickly as they needed to be.

Solution

Banner selected Redwood Reporting for its automated report processing, centralized web access and ease-of-use.

Results

Banner Health’s 400+ decision makers now have instant, web-based access to the accurate, timely data and 6,000+ unique reports they need. They can identify issues and make decisions before they have a significant impact on Banner, its resources, members, or patients.

Processing 175,000 raw reports in an average month, Banner Health relies heavily on Redwood Reporting’s advanced bursting functionality. Banner also uses Redwood Reporting to convert report information into alternative formats, such as Microsoft Excel®. “It saves an extraordinary amount of space and bandwidth by storing reports in one place rather than storing multiple copies in multiple locations,” said Beaver.

Redwood Reporting ingests output from any data source and stores it in its repository, giving select Banner users digital access to 7,000,000+ reports or just certain parts of reports based on their job titles and roles.

Information can be user-specific, and is secure, auditable, and available at the right time in a format they can actually use. For example, Banner employees can easily analyze everything from patient load to staffing and billing requirements.

Data and report analysis is faster, easier, and more insightful with Redwood Reporting’s customizable report packages. Redwood Reporting can also apply business rules and extract totals from reports. “This capability saves us immeasurable time,” said Beaver. “If the totals are correct, managers rarely have to dig deeper but if the totals are incorrect, managers can quickly obtain the details they need to investigate further.”

Of the many intuitive, built-in Redwood Reporting features, Banner likes the fact that it’s incredibly easy to add new users and set up automated email notifications. “It really accelerates our processing time,” said Beaver. “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.”

Because Redwood Reporting is so intuitive and easy to understand, new users require minimal training. A short, basic training session is all Banner employees need to start seeing the benefits. “We don’t need to do extensive training, which saves us time and money,” said Beaver.

As Banner experienced the many benefits of Redwood Reporting, the organization made even better use of the platform as they became more familiar with it and saw what it could do for them and for their patients.