Netherlands shows the way in healthcare accountability

Sep 3 2009

As national healthcare reform initiatives grab headlines throughout the U.S., Maasstad Hospital in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is quietly demonstrating how physicians, nurses, and administrators can be held accountable to national performance standards. Using business intelligence (BI) and performance management solutions from Information Builders, an independent leader in BI solutions, the 600-bed primary care facility is delivering current clinical and administrative data to help managers steer the hospital on a daily basis. Each department adheres to a set of daily metrics, encouraging a culture of performance and establishing best practices for common procedures, so doctors can be consistently compared to their peers.

The Netherlands has increased accountability and reduced healthcare costs over the last four decades. The ultimate goal is to introduce incentives for efficiency to guarantee sustainable health care expenditures over the long term -- a familiar rallying cry for today's U.S. politicians.

"No matter how healthcare is regulated, we must perform within our strategy to provide the best care at the lowest cost," said Henri de Wit, manager of finance and business intelligence at Maasstad Hospital. "Strategic tools like Information Builders' WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework help us meet our goals. We want to have satisfied patients as well as satisfied employees, so we are using this software to benchmark our critical processes and create quality of care standards."

With help from Information Builders Professional Services department, Maasstad used WebFOCUS Performance Management Framework (PMF) to capture more than 100 key performance indicators (KPIs) and present them to authorized personnel via secure, customizable dashboards. Built on top of Information Builders' popular WebFOCUS BI platform, PMF includes pre-set roles for analysts, administrators, and information consumers. It also features more than 100 reports and graphs, hundreds of pre-built metric rules, and a variety of dashboards, which made it easy to deploy quickly. Users can personalize the dashboard environment by deciding which reports they wish to see and how they want them to be displayed.

"WebFOCUS PMF was easy to get up and running quickly," de Wit said. "It is designed to quickly capture metrics and deploy dashboards."

Maasstad's performance information comes from a diverse set of sources. A ChipSoft transaction system gathers information from radiology, dialysis, administration, pharmacy, salary, financials, and other business domains. This information is loaded into a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse, which serves as a staging point for delivering current information to the performance management system. Armed with this information, Maasstad uses a dual-management system, which places responsibility on the shoulders of both administrators and clinicians. WebFOCUS PMF enforces this management strategy with targeted dashboards that help each administrator, nurse, and doctor monitor the hospital's cost and quality of care.

"Maasstad Hospital is proving that there is truth in the old adage: 'You can't improve what you can't measure,'" said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. "This innovative institution is making hospital performance information easier to access, analyze, and comprehend in an effort to provide the best healthcare at the lowest possible cost."

SOURCE: Information Builders