ACADEMIA

Cognos today announced that The Nebraska Medical Center has selected the Cognos performance management solution for a Balanced Scorecard project that consolidates more than five years of patient care and financial history with forward-looking performance data into a single, integrated system. With a history dating back to 1869, The Nebraska Medical Center is the teaching hospital for the University of Nebraska's health sciences programs. Representing 950 physicians, the medical center is a respected leader in solid organ transplantation, bone marrow transplantation, oncology, cardiology, neurology and burn care. Last year, the medical center initiated a top-down Balanced Scorecard project to define its performance measures and focus on operational performance across all departments. To complement and extend this initiative, the medical center looked for a solution that would be able to pull together disparate data sources and establish a sustainable analytic data warehouse to support the scorecard in real-time with the most up-to-date financial and patient information. The ability to integrate plan and forecast data in the data warehouse was also an imperative. Cognos was selected as the medical center's standard following a competitive review. Cognos Platinum partner CBH Consultants is partnering with the medical center and Cognos for the implementation. "In keeping with the medical center's reputation for innovation, we wanted to consolidate our patient and financial information with an integrated system for performance management," said Mary Jo Brummel, director of Budget and Decision Support, The Nebraska Medical Center. "With Cognos' capabilities, we will be able to easily expand the number of business users who can plan, assess, and score performance against goals, so everyone, including senior executives, can self-serve performance information such as trends in cardiology or the number of hip replacements and the physicians that perform them. Ultimately, the information gleaned is used to take patient care to a new level of excellence." The Cognos Performance Management Platform integrates the best-in-class scorecarding and dashboarding, planning, analysis, query and reporting, and event management capabilities that organizations and partners need to build performance management solutions for sustainable competitive advantage. "The Nebraska Medical Center's selection of Cognos as its standard for performance management is illustrative of our continued competitive edge in the CPM market," said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, Global Marketing, Cognos. "Our performance management solution provides a modern decision-making platform with a clear line of sight to turn data assets into actionable information enabling faster, more informed decisions that positively impact the organization." Cognos solutions for performance management combine the forward management view of the business (planning, budgeting, and forecasting) with the current and historical view of the business (financial consolidations, scorecarding, reporting, and analysis). These integrated operational and financial views across all relevant time horizons let customers proactively address business challenges for greater operational effectiveness. Cognos' industry-leading solutions have helped numerous healthcare organizations worldwide cut costs, increase operational efficiencies, and comply with government regulations. In addition to The Nebraska Medical Center, Cognos can be found in such leading healthcare organizations as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, South Tyneside Health Care NHS Trust (UK), and Trillium Health Centre (Canada). For more information, please visit its Web site.