Easy-to-Use SAP® BusinessObjects™ XI Intelligence Platform to Help Marshfield Healthcare Professionals Efficiently Deliver Higher Quality of Services

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) announced that Wisconsin-based healthcare provider Marshfield Clinic has selected the comprehensive SAP® BusinessObjects™ XI intelligence platform to replace its existing business intelligence (BI) system. Offering simple, intuitive BI solutions to hundreds of physicians and business executives, Marshfield Clinic plans to more fully use its vast warehouses of historical patient data to better serve patients. By providing simplified access to treatment information ranging back more than 30 years and self-serve tools to analyze that data, doctors will be able to create a more well-informed plan of action based on each patient's medical history. SAP BusinessObjects software will also provide Marshfield Clinic with detailed insight into its own operations so the organization can optimize clinical performance and make better-informed business decisions based on trusted data.

Marshfield Clinic was established in 1916 by six physicians and now has about 800 physicians and 6,500 support personnel in more than 40 locations. Marshfield Clinic provides patient care, research, education and clinical laboratory services, and also has a health maintenance organization. The Clinic system has contributed numerous medical and service innovations to the healthcare industry and has accumulated one of the richest warehouses of healthcare patient data in America, reflecting encounters on more than 2.1 million patients.

"To provide Marshfield Clinic physicians with better tools to improve quality care, we needed to invest in a new BI system, one that would allow people without deep technical knowledge or training to easily access historical data and derive accurate conclusions from that data," said Jeremy Meller, Clinic Division CIO, Marshfield Clinic. "We believe our decision to use SAP BusinessObjects solutions will help empower our physicians and administrators with the ability to better find detailed answers to their own questions, allowing our BI team to focus on more strategic initiatives. As we evaluated various BI vendors, we realized that a high-performing, intuitive user interface was one of the most important elements to take into consideration for our organization. SAP BusinessObjects software gives us the best tool kit to accomplish our goals and it really set the organization apart from the competition. Everything is user-friendly, responsive and engaging-for everyone, not just BI experts."

Before implementing SAP BusinessObjects solutions, Marshfield Clinic relied on complex ad-hoc query tools that required users to undergo extensive training to operate. As a result, maximizing benefits from Marshfield's vast data repositories was severely hindered, as routine ad-hoc report development fell to the BI team.

"Our BI team did wonders with the tools they were provided, but our supply of programmer analyst resources fell far short of the demand," said Kate Konitzer, Analytics manager, Marshfield Clinic.

With solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, Marshfield Clinic can now use reporting, query and analysis, dashboards and visualizations, intuitive discovery and even advanced predictive analytics to deliver more effective diagnoses and treatments for patients. The simplicity and self-service nature of these capabilities were critical in Marshfield's decision to select SAP.

Using SAP BusinessObjects software to put decision-quality information in the hands of people that need it, Marshfield Clinic will empower physicians to make real-time decisions that can improve quality of patient care. For example, physicians will now hold in their hands years of patient data and studies on diseases, ranging from heart disease to cancer, and will be able to leverage this information in seconds, rather than days, to better analyze, diagnose and treat people immediately at the point of patient care. Additionally, the SAP BusinessObjects XI intelligence platform will give physicians and Marshfield management teams the ability to easily create detailed reports, dashboards and visualizations that reflect treatment and organization statistics. With solutions like Xcelsius®, a dynamic and customizable data visualization software, they will have the ability to drill down into that information for more details and perform independent analysis.

With SAP BusinessObjects XI, Marshfield Clinic's IT team will be able to provide self-service reporting and analysis tools to physicians and administrators, freeing up time to focus on using BI technology. Marshfield will use SAP BusinessObjects XI to improve clinic management with richer insight into areas like quality measurement, patient care and patient satisfaction, making it easier for business executives to evaluate overall performance and identify strengths and areas for improvement.

Marshfield Clinic deals with approximately 34,000 scheduled reports and 2,600 ad-hoc reports each year, and will use SAP BusinessObjects XI to accomplish this in a fraction of the time it used to take. By efficiently providing information to its healthcare professionals, the organization improves its ability to offer quality services, ranging from patient treatment to business modeling to research efforts into various disease stages. Marshfield now has at its fingertips a deeper understanding of what is happening in its greater network and can actively help its physicians meet and exceed the high quality standards established by the Clinic.

"The SAP BusinessObjects XI intelligence platform is unique because it delivers powerful BI capabilities that are also intuitive to the average business user," said Marge Breya, general manager and executive vice president, Intelligence Platform Group, SAP BusinessObjects Division. "Its strength lies in its simplicity and accessibility to all people. Organizations like Marshfield Clinic are using the platform to break down the traditional barriers that exist within an organization and open up its valuable data assets to benefit the greater good and accomplish its overarching mission-in this case, better serving and treating a broad base of patients."

For more information, visit http://www.sap.com.

Courtesy of SAP