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Computerworld - Emergency room doctors use an array of monitors to keep track of patients' vital signs. But just as important to a patient's recovery is how well the team performs overall in providing care. The better an emergency department's resources are scheduled and allocated, the faster the service and the better the end result.

Emergency Medical Associates in Livingston, N.J., uses business intelligence software from Business Objects SA to give doctors and administrators of the 17 hospital emergency departments it manages access to data in near real time. In addition to producing a positive financial result, it has also helped improve clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Emergency Medical Associates

This physician-owned group manages 17 emergency rooms for hospitals in the New Jersey and New York area. •  Project Champion: Jonathan Rothman, director of data management; Ray Iannaccone, physician champion •  IT department: 30 employees Payback: Reduced by 50% or more the number of patients leaving without being seen in some locations.

"We have managed to cut the number of patients who leave without receiving treatment by 50% or more in some of the emergency departments we manage," says Eric Bachenheimer, EMA's director of client solutions. EMA looked at the patient arrival rate to determine when the peak times are in the emergency department, as well as at the types of cases being diagnosed. "From that we can understand when the greatest stresses on the system exist," Bachenheimer says.

By looking at the diagnostic data, for example, EMA units have increased the numbers of nurses, changed bed allocations, developed systems for moving patients through emergency rooms more quickly, and introduced specialized units for observation.

Jonathan Rothman, EMA's director of data management, began laying the groundwork for the BI system in 1998. In 2001, he deployed a non-Web-based version of Business Objects that required him to manually run any reports requested. Then came the challenge of getting people to use the system.

"The hardest part of BI is not the technology; it is the culture," Rothman explains. "Teaching people how to act upon data and analytics is harder than building the tools that report the data."

But people did catch on, and Rothman found himself having to compile a list of every single report that all the hospital managers wanted to see. Then, every month, he would have to remember to run each report, export it as a PDF and send it to those individuals.

"We found ourselves in a situation where we couldn't keep up with demand," says Rothman. "So we had a choice: either hire more people or figure out how to better utilize the technology."