Data Warehousing for Healthcare Companies using Sage 100

This article will explore the benefits of a data warehouse for Healthcare organizations using Sage 100.

All organizations rely on data to identify and meet goals, with plans for growth and development budgeted.  Data warehousing is a powerful option to structure and enrich business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) analytics.  A data warehouse (DW), by definition, is a multi-dimensional database that can house a significant amount of information, deriving from an assortment of sources within an organization, used to make good management decisions.  Your information in DWs can be used in reporting, routine budgeting and forecasting, and dashboards – or big picture performance data questions.  A DW organizes by subject, focusing interactions through topics, like financials, patients, services, or clinics.  If you’re a Healthcare organization using Sage 100, this article will highlight the impact of a DW for your team.

If the concept of a DW still isn’t coming together in your mind, let’s try another way to understand the solution.  Think of a DW as a digital storage space.  Similar to how external hard drives provide you a place to keep a number of file types and applications, DWs give users a unified space for a variety of operational and transactional data types.  But how do you know if your Healthcare organizations needs a DW?
There is no specific threshold you can cross where you would definitely need a DW, but there are some indicators.  If you feel like manual documentation is becoming or is already tortuous, in addition to data analytics and management with Microsoft Excel, which typically results in higher costs and/or errors, it’s probably a great time to evaluate a DW investment.  If you’re experiencing a sluggish Sage 100 server because of routine data queries, a DW delivers high performance and stability without slowing down Sage 100.  Additionally, if your Healthcare organization requires reporting and data from other data sources besides Sage 100, such as payroll or sales systems, it might be time to invest in a DW.  Finally, a DW provides a database that simplifies and refines your analyses by consolidating diverse data sources.
Sage 100 is an established and reputable enterprise resource planning (ERP system, scalable and flexible with an assortment of modules designed to meet the needs of diverse industries.  Some impactful qualities that Sage 100 boasts include automated and streamlined, as well as collaborative processes, and strong customer relationship management. However, in this era of best-in-breed software solutions for custom analytical processes, one system is not going to be the catch-all for your Healthcare organization.  For example, analytics are panning out and including data from different areas for a richer understanding of the strength of the organization through reporting, budgeting, and dashboards, so you are more likely to require information from Sage 100 as well as a payroll, patient, and/or even a claims system.  Maybe your organization is a parent company with multiple entities, and financial consolidation is required for a complete look at the health of the business across all subsidiaries.  DWs organically consolidate and organize your wide range of metrics, so that you can remain competitive and provide constantly improving patient care.  Sage 100 is just the tip of the iceberg, but a DW can provide so much value to your analytical processes.
In terms of Healthcare reporting, analyses range from traditional financial statements, simple and straightforward or a consolidation of multiple data sources and subsidiaries.  You can also leverage the power of some more dynamic tools to craft dashboards for executives that highlight actuals versus budgeted revenues, monthly or twelve-month trends, gross margin, medical supply inventory turnover rate by distribution center, top patients with drill down items, top treatments or items with drill down to customers, and top suppliers.  One potentially helpful dashboard example involves benchmarking, pulling data from external data sources to compare your company’s financial health and select other Healthcare companies.  The executive team is probably going to be the most interested in revenue and what is having an effect on the bottom line, but there are other focal points for Healthcare companies focused on making smarter directional decisions.
Healthcare organizations have a lot of moving parts, some involving Sage 100, some from other data sources.  Regarding insurance, your team might like to compare claims filed versus claims paid, as well as claims rejected by reason, top payors, and top physicians.  Your team might opt to run a report or produce a dashboard based on the clinical experience – detailing the amount of admissions and readmissions, by a diagnosis-related group (DRG), which is a system that categorizes inpatient stays into groups for payment.  Another report could identify the average length of stay as a twelve-month trend, the average charge by DRG and/or the count by patient type.  You might choose to evaluate data you possess around patient satisfaction, by facility and/or by patient type – and this could result in a report about wait time by patient type and by facility.  These are all reporting examples that go beyond the traditional reporting, as in Profit and Loss (P&L), operational statements with KPIs, and variance reports by physician, by clinic, and so on, but data warehouses are a powerful solution to enable cross-system reporting, budgeting, and dashboards.
Data will continue to grow in importance when it comes to organizational decision-making for Healthcare organizations.  Relatedly, DWs are becoming more prevalent specifically because they bring together your company data source information into one high performance space for enriched analyses, without IT involvement for management of the software.  Solver offers a fully built, configurable Microsoft SQL Server-based data warehouse, stand-alone and as part of the comprehensive suite of BI modules.  We would be happy to answer questions and generally review BI360’s easy-to-use Data Warehouse solution that enables collaborative, streamlined decision-making capabilities for your Sage 100 experience as a Healthcare organization.