Brigham and Women's Hospital Selects SAS for Performance Management Solution; Noted Healthcare Facility to Use SAS For Balanced Scorecard Implementations

Business Wire, August 26, 2002

Business Editors/High Tech, Health & Medical Writers

CARY, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 26, 2002

Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, recognized internationally for its excellence in patient care, medical research, and training of outstanding young health professionals, has selected SAS(R) Strategic Performance Management for Healthcare to power the hospital's balanced scorecard initiatives.

SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced the multi-year partnership that supports the formation of the SAS Healthcare Division, established in April to help healthcare leaders deliver better patient care, provide better service to physicians, boost employee satisfaction and increase profitability.

"Information technology implementations at large healthcare facilities such as ours have a high degree of complexity," said Sue Schade, chief information officer for Brigham and Women's Hospital. "When purchasing software solutions, we look critically at the vendor's track record of success."

"We're extremely gratified that executives at Brigham and Women's Hospital, renowned worldwide for patient care and research, have chosen SAS to provide the technological backbone for their balanced scorecard initiatives," said Theresa Tesh, senior director of SAS' Healthcare Division. "Their commitment to SAS is a tremendous compliment to our potent combination of extensive C-level healthcare and business expertise and our industry-leading business intelligence solutions."

Administrators at Brigham and Women's Hospital are currently inundated with data streaming from their clinical and financial systems, and they also recognize the need to integrate this information with other important data, such as patient and employee satisfaction levels. Hospital leaders have used paper-based balanced scorecards to address these issues, but these scorecards are time-consuming to produce and unwieldy when users look for correlations between measures found on different reports.

"We're overwhelmed with data from many sources and systems," noted Michael Gustafson, M.D., M.B.A., Executive Director, Center for Clinical Excellence. "We have been looking for a framework to prioritize and link key measures with our strategic initiatives: increasing hospital capacity and revenue, maintaining high levels of patient service and quality, maintaining the right mix of ambulatory and inpatient care, balancing our role as an academic healthcare facility with our commitment to the community, and retaining and recruiting employees."

Gustafson believes SAS Strategic Performance Management for Healthcare will help make these strategic goals attainable. "Our front-line healthcare providers and managers will be able to immediately act on adverse trends if we put up-to-date information in their hands and help them see how what they do on a daily basis ties into the hospital's strategy and mission. For instance, our nursing staff will be able to use balanced scorecards to more thoroughly understand how staffing patterns correlate with patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes."

Brigham and Women's Hospital will use SAS Strategic Performance Management for Healthcare initially to roll out scorecards to its surgical and nursing staffs, who have already identified strategic measures and used paper-based balanced scorecards. Implementation in the hospital's financial and executive ranks will follow.

SAS Strategic Performance Management for Healthcare lets organizations focus, communicate and collaborate on strategy and then turn these strategies into action. With the SAS Strategic Performance Management for Healthcare solution, healthcare leaders can implement balanced scorecards, Six Sigma or other quality frameworks to connect traditional business data, like revenues and profits, with intangible measures such as the satisfaction of their patients, employees and physicians. The solution allows organizational leaders to communicate and measure, at an enterprise level, the degree of strategic alignment and the progress toward desired outcomes.

About Brigham and Women's Hospital

Brigham and Women's Hospital is a 719-bed nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of Partners HealthCare System, an integrated healthcare delivery network. Internationally recognized as a leading academic healthcare institution, Brigham and Women's Hospital is committed to excellence in patient care, medical research, and the training and education of healthcare professionals. The hospital's preeminence in all aspects of clinical care is coupled with its strength in medical research. A leading recipient of research grants from the National Institutes of Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital conducts internationally acclaimed clinical, basic and epidemiological studies.

About SAS

SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 38,000 sites - including 98 of the top 100 businesses on the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(TM). Visit us at www.sas.com.