Healthcare Provider Saves Thousands

—A Geac Success Story

Lee Memorial Health System, one of the largest public health systems in Florida, identified two projects it needed to undertake: making master patient information readily available to users; and streamlining its new enterprise patient scheduling process as well as streamlining processes within the human resources department. In the first project, the company wanted to integrate data from the mainframe with a client/server application on an Oracle database. Lee Memorial Health System spoke to a number of vendors about how to make this integration happen.

The second project, the human resources overhaul, was necessary in order to significantly reduce the inefficiency and costs related to redundant manual data entry. Geac® Process Management, which allows discrete applications to communicate with each other and combines cross-functional tasks into one seamless process, proved to be the tool that could not only address the current challenge but be used for future projects as well.

A Flexible Solution for Varied Needs

Lee Memorial Health System evaluated suggestions from several vendors based on a number of criteria:

• The solution's ability to tie together multiple applications so that they performed as one seamless system;

• The capability to provide a comfortable interface and quality response time to end users while still leveraging the latest programming techniques;

• The capacity to integrate with existing technology in order to leverage investments already made; and

• The ease of using the tool and its flexibility in supporting other projects going forward.

Already a Geac M Series customer, Lee Memorial Health System chose Geac Process Management for its ability to integrate with almost any source system along with its customizable, web-based user coaches, automatic task assignment, easy-to-use analysis tools and streamlined implementation.

"We needed to integrate our enterprise patient scheduling and mainframe applications with respect to the new-hire process," said Jeff Ward, manager of financial information systems. "We also wanted to show the core HR and finance users how we could replace the manual keying in of data and printing of forms with a Web-based system and an e-form that would go into the system automatically. Streamlining that workflow eliminated a lot of potential errors and the time that is wasted retouching the records—all those gray areas that make a big difference but that you can't put a hard dollar figure on."

The Geac system provided a solution for the training process as well. "We needed a way to schedule people into orientation so that our HR people knew how many new employees were signed up, whether the maximum number of participants had been reached, whether they actually showed up and whether their paperwork had been completed beforehand," said Ward. "In the past, we had no way of monitoring that information. Now our recruiters and training coordinators can pull up a screen at any time to check the status."

Substantial Savings of Money and Time

Lee Memorial Health System experienced significant benefits with their new system. The streamlined new-hire process resulted in substantial annual time savings:

• Recruiter time was reduced by 50%;

• Training coordinator time was reduced by 80%; and

• HR assistant time was reduced by 84%.

Taking an average number of new hires per week as a baseline, the time savings equates to a monetary savings per year amounting to just under $300,000.

The benefits of integrating several back-end applications aren't necessarily measured in the same way as are the benefits of streamlining the HR processes, but Ward says they are nevertheless substantial.

"These are significant monetary and man-hour savings per year, but there are other things like error reductions, better productivity, and lower fax, phone and interoffice mail costs that I would consider ‘soft' savings," said Ward.

Adaptability for Future Projects

Lee Memorial Health System's next project will be to streamline the human resources termination and employee data change process. "We'll apply what we learned the first time around to this next project," said Ward. "A cross section of Lee Memorial Health System will review sample screen shots along with diagrams so that we can receive input to the project from both the end users and the administrators. During the employee termination process, managers will want to go to one place and start clicking, while the people on the back end will be touching the system in different ways. What we're really expecting to do is to combine the best of work flow and data flow into one process."

The accounts receivable area may be the next beneficiary of the Geac Process Management system. The average number of days outstanding per bill will be trimmed, as will the number of management hours spent reviewing open accounts.

Other projects may involve Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, debit memo processing for returned goods, a job code creation and validation process and streamlining of the capital approval process, to name just a few of several possibilities.

"We've been able to leverage the Geac Process Management tool to provide functionality that I'm not sure people really thought the tool could do at first," said Ward. "We've taken a stab at doing some evolutionary things with product integration that, in the past, have always been done a certain way. Now we're taking it to the next level—by integrating into other products, we're creating reusable technology."

Industry: Healthcare

Technology: Oracle, Mainframe, DB2, ASP

The Challenges:

• Integrate data from multiple systems that had no logical way of communicating with each other;

• Deliver information in real time in a multi-user environment; and

• Invest in a tool that could be used for other projects going forward.

ROI Calculation:

• Saved nearly $300,000 per year by streamlining the new hire process;

• Reduced man hours associated with the new hire process by up to 84%; and

• Saved nearly 20,300 staff hours per year.

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Geac Process Management, powered by Lombardi, enables companies to maximize the effectiveness of both their software applications and the people involved in a business process, both through rich integration functionality and task flow coordination. To find out more about Geac Process Management, please call 800-922-7979 or send an e-mail to chris.kelly@geac.com