Newark Beth Israel plugs in software that automatically generates reports
By João-Pierre Ruth
6/16/2008

Fred Schroeder, a programmer at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. [Steven J. Dundas]

NEWARK — The growing amount of data that managers must review is getting ever-harder to keep track of. While billings, customer s and status reports can be swiftly entered into computer networks, it can be a challenge to assemble the information later into easy-to-read reports. Software that automates this process can help companies and organizations save time and money.Newark Beth Israel Medical Center needed to free its information technology staff from generating the daily s that administrators require. “All our outpatient clinics need to know what happened the day before,” says Fred Schroeder, senior programmer at the hospital. “Did they check out patients properly? What was the diagnosis? Who worked on which patient? How much payment was collected?”

Newark Beth Israel turned to ActiveBatch software from Advanced Systems Concepts, a Morristown company with 40 employees. The system coordinates different programs to generate electronic reports and perform other tasks that include alerting Schroeder to any technical errors that he must personally resolve.

Such report-generating software is an increasingly hot item and versions are available from companies including IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Tidal Software, a provider of performance-management systems in Palo Alto, Calif.

Schroeder says Newark Beth Israel started using ActiveBatch last July to enable IT staffers to focus on their primary jobs of providing computer support. The hospital previously relied on computer help-desk personnel to compile the reports at night.

Newark Beth Israel has 673 beds, sees 25,000 admissions and more than 300,000 outpatient visits annually. Daily data can include the number of patients inside its clinics and the number of newborns in the maternity ward, giving rise to a mountain of information over time.

“Administrators, department heads, managers need to review their [data] and we are required to report to regulatory agencies,” Schroeder says. The hospital sends regular reports to the Department of Health and Senior Services, as well as daily s on its emergency room admissions to city officials in Newark. “If I don’t send the reports, the phone rings,” Schroeder says. Now, “I don’t have to have someone constantly checking on this.”

At the same time, “the [hospital] administration at 9 a.m. each morning can say, ‘This is what happened yesterday,’” Schroeder says. “That is a very critical report.”

Joseph Carr, chief information officer for the New Jersey Hospital Association in Princeton, says hospitals face mushrooming information demands. Many hospitals run computer programs that track patients throughout their stays, he says, generating information that is needed by health insurers for billing purposes as well as the Department of Health. “Hospitals in New Jersey are required by law to submit information on all in-patient surgeries, same-day surgeries and emergency-room visits,” Carr says.

He says the state has been collecting data on same-day surgeries since 1982, and on emergency room visits since 2004. The files include treatments performed, charges for treatments and reimbursements for the charges. He says the state may expand its requests for outpatient data to include information on chemotherapy at oncology clinics.

Jane Horowitz, chief operating officer for the National Alliance for Health Information Technology in Chicago, says a national push is under way for more efficient information tracking within hospitals. She says billing information and other administrative data is frequently spread across different computer systems that do not communicate smoothly with one another. “When you start building electronic health records that exchange data, that is where some of the problems come,” she says.

Jim Manias, vice president of sales and marketing for Advanced Systems Concepts, says customers include companies in the manufacturing, government and services sectors. “Any organization that has more than one computing system can benefit,” he says.

Mehul Amin, senior development engineer with the company, says the software acts to consolidate disparate systems, “which is becoming one of the biggest challenges lately.”

Related Content

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback