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.