Redwood Solutions for Healthcare: Banner Health

Report2Web provides both strong security and easy access to critical report information.

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Banner Health is one

of the largest nonprofit healthcare systems in
the United States. The system owns or manages
23 hospitals, long-term care services, and other
facilities located in seven states. Banner Health
operates across a vast area from Alaska to
Arizona and employs over 35,000 people who
care for more than 230,000 in-patients and
600,000 emergency room patients each year.
At A Glance
Industry
• Healthcare
Environment
• Complex, heterogeneous
healthcare environment
with a variety of supporting
technologies
• Disparate systems serve a
large group of users including
accounting, patient financial
systems, managers and IT staff
located across seven different
states
Key Challenges
• Analyze patient load, billing
and staffing needs to
achieve a dynamic balance
that maintains a financially
sustainable quality of care
throughout the system
• Manage complex billing and
payment systems
The Solution
• Report2Web document storage
and distribution
Key Benefits
• Easy access to critical staffing,
billing, and resource monitoring
reports through the web-
enabled archiving system
• Tight security for all documents
and reports
• Smooth integration with
existing report-producing
software providing exactly
the information hospital
decision makers need without
overwhelming them with data
• Easy to use, requiring little or no
training for staff
• Significant reduction in time
and effort required to generate
meaningful reports
Manual Effort with Minimal Results
Banner is a nationally recognized healthcare leader. In 2010 Thomson Reuters cited the
system as one of the Top 10 Health Systems and as a Top 10 Integrated Healthcare
Network (IHN)™ by SDI. As it has grown, Banner Health demanded more from its IT
resources to provide reports on clinical and financial operations. Its original report
distribution solution was simply not able to deliver on those demands. Previous document
management systems produced mixed results. While these systems allowed them to
produce reports around staffing, payment and resource use, the reports were very large
and took too long for the system to generate. Once the reports were run, they required
a great deal of manual effort to gather the critical information hospital leaders needed
to make informed decisions on billing, staffing and other issues.
Because the reports took so long to run and required so much manual effort to be
useful, they were often duplicated, emailed, and stored in several locations throughout
the hospital’s network for use by multiple internal customers. For example, Accounting
might have one copy of a report while human resources would keep another copy of the
same report to use for their own purposes. This created a heavy and growing storage
burden on Banner as well as serious concerns around version control and security.
With their old system, Banner could not enforce user-level security on reports. Aside
from the obvious security issues, this also meant that every internal customer had to
weed through thousands of reports to find the vital information required for their role.
The issue of batch processed reports created even more latency in the system. As
information came in late in the day, many reports would not be available for viewing
until the following day. Sometimes it would take days for hospital managers to manually
process this information to uncover trends or problems. This kind of latency was
unacceptable to the healthcare system. They needed a better solution.
As the hospital grew, so did their frustration with their report management and distribution.
New accounting staff, IT staff, department managers, patient financial systems employees
and others joined the ever-increasing universe of users. Each person requested his or her
special reports, and with each new report, the system grew slower and more complex.
“ We looked at Report2Web and we
saw exactly what we needed.
“
Bill Beaver
IT Director, Enterprise Integration Services,
Banner Health
 Banner uses Report2Web to combine information from MS4, Lawson, Eclipsys®, and BMC’s Control-D,
to unify business, healthcare and IT data into a single reporting platform.
Report2Web: Fast, Intuitive and Secure
Banner sought to simplify and automate the increasingly
complex, resource-intensive environment that was growing
around them. With Report2Web, all of the features they needed
were built right in.
“The email notifications are especially useful and powerful.
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,” explains Beaver.
“Not only does this accelerate our processing time, but it also
saves space and bandwidth by storing reports in one place and
providing access for departments rather than storing multiple
copies in multiple locations.”
Report2Web provides an intuitive, easy to use, web-based
interface. With more than 400 users throughout the company,
ease of use was a critical factor. “When we add a new user, we
just email their credentials with a brief training presentation, and
they are ready to use Report2Web,” explains Beaver. “Extensive
training is not necessary. That saves on cost and time.”
The security model delivers access control based on facility,
individual report and/or cost center. Not only does this provide
the essential security required by Banner, it also gives people
the specific information they need for their specific role. Users
no longer have to wade through pages of irrelevant data to
find exactly what they need.
With Report2Web, Banner now captures documents from
any platform or application – healthcare or otherwise –
including Adobe® PDFs and flat files. This information can
then be automatically burst, bundled, and secured in custom
reports. Indexing rules ensure rapid retrieval while building a
comprehensive audit trail for all documents.
Growing Together
The organization has had Report2Web in production for more than
two years, and has since added two new facilities. Processing
175,000 raw reports in an average month, they rely heavily on
the advanced bursting functionality of Report2Web. Banner
also uses Report2Web to convert report information into
alternate formats, such as Microsoft Excel®. Users throughout
the healthcare system have access to exactly the information
they need in a format they can use. Accounting can pull detail
or aggregated payment information from wherever they wish
and then quickly and easily analyze that information with Excel,
a tool they use every day. Staffing and payroll can do the same.
“Banner has more than 6,000 unique reports,” says Beaver.
“We currently have more than seven million reports in our
system. That’s equivalent to 24,000 four-drawer filing cabinets.
This many filing cabinets would fill 1.3 football fields, without
the end zones. We needed a powerful solution to handle this
information and make it useful to us – and we have it.”
“ We needed a powerful solution to
handle this information and make “
it useful to us – and we have it..

The ease of customizing reports in Report2Web resulted in

tremendous time savings. Now Banner can automatically create
custom packages for its end users and apply business rules to
extract totals from specific reports. Managers can focus on
analyzing the totals rather than finding them. They no longer
drown in data. “This ability saves us immeasurable time. If
the totals are correct, managers often don’t need to see the
detail,” says Beaver. “If the totals are incorrect, managers can
quickly obtain that detail and investigate.”

As Banner continues to improve their system and processes

with Report2Web, they plan to expand their implementation
to electronically notify physicians when documents are needed
or received, decommission additional legacy software, and
minimize network traffic. “We want to allow end users to publish
non-production reports to Report2Web rather than emailing
multiple copies to groups of individuals,” says Beaver. “Not
only is this more efficient, it will also help keep us collaborative
and accurate.”

For Banner, Report2Web is not just an improvement, it’s a solution.

It provides the organization with a system to enforce security
and make critical information available when and where it’s
needed. Report2Web offers the flexibility and power to handle
high volumes of sensitive information quickly and efficiently. As
Banner Health continues to grow, they can focus on providing
world-class healthcare while their report management system
grows right along with them.

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identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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