Business Objects Launches Activity Based Costing Solution for Healthcare; New Performance Management Application Integrates Financial and Patient Data to Develop Accurate Cost and Profitability Metrics Across Clinical Service Lines

Business Wire, June 19, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 -- BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the availability of BusinessObjects(TM) Activity Based Costing for Healthcare. Built using Business Objects planning technology, this new performance management application enables healthcare organizations to identify and analyze trends in key clinical and financial indicators across patient groups. Using these trends, healthcare organizations can more easily formulate strategies that drive improvements in operational and financial performance.

For healthcare organizations to plan effectively, they need a way to accurately assign costs, typically stored in summary form on their general ledger, to the specific tests and procedures used to care for patients. BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare delivers a sustainable framework for collecting and reporting timely, accurate, and reliable costing data. The solution helps organizations compute costs and margins on a per-patient basis to allow them to more easily analyze the information by physician, across service lines, or by HMO contract to identify trends in volume, cost, and margin.

This innovative application enables clinical managers to better understand and manage the costs associated with patient care, and provides healthcare executives with performance reporting and dashboards that support improved strategic and operational decision making. For example, a hospital network could use the application to identify that it is more cost-effective to service particular cardiac patients at a specialty clinic with comprehensive cardiac services, than it is at the main hospital. By shifting patients seen more regularly to these clinics, the healthcare network could save money while increasing the level of service it provides patients.

Activity Based Costing at Saint Mary's Health Care

Saint Mary's Health Care, which operates a network that includes 2,500 employees, a 324-bed hospital, and several centers for specialized care, has recently deployed BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing to help quantify the costs of providing services to patients. Using the Business Objects solution has put Saint Mary's Health Care on the right path to analyze trends in cost-per-care for each particular product line or patient population. With this information, administrators can work with physicians and staff to reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of care.

"There is a real need for activity based costing information in healthcare, but until now it was not widely available," said Dan Green, director of financial analysis and budget at Saint Mary's Health Care. "Using Business Objects, we now have a systematic and intuitive approach to gathering costing information, so we can spend more time implementing performance improvements. Business Objects allows everyone in our organization to do what we really want to do -- give our patients something more."

Providing a Relevant, Trustworthy, and Insightful Activity Based Costing Solution

Many healthcare organizations find traditional activity based costing models difficult to implement and maintain. These models often produce too much detail, and accounting for changes an organization's processes, resource spending, or activities are extremely difficult. BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare is automated and easy to deploy, and helps to turn the most complex and detailed patient-level data into information that managers can use to make decisions.

Highlights of the new application include the ability to:

--Effectively engage managers with an intuitive user interface and cost factor input screens

--Easily update models to reflect changes in procedures, processes, or costs

--Accurately calculate patient costs with flexible overhead allocation methods that support both traditional step-down and direct-to-patient allocations

--Define service lines using any level of clinical and utilization detail

--Perform utilization and margin analysis at multiple levels -- by patient, service line, physician, and more

--Leverage familiar formatting and graphing functions through sophisticated reporting capabilities that are fully integrated with Microsoft Excel

--Easily incorporate external benchmark data and compare to internal standards

Cascade Healthcare Community, Inc., which operates as St. Charles Medical Center in Bend and Redmond, Oregon, is another early adopter of BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing for Healthcare. Cascade, which manages more than 265 hospital beds and 2,300 employees, wanted a solution that would simplify its cost accounting process while increasing trust in its costing results.

"Like every healthcare organization, we needed accurate costing data, and a costing model that our managers could easily understand and update," said Paul Henry, senior financial analyst at Cascade Healthcare Community. "If you don't understand your costing process and its methods, you risk creating numbers that lack management buy-in and are essentially unusable -- causing the data to lose its value for strategic decision making. Business Objects delivered a solution that allowed us to improve our data analysis and deploy an online model that management trusts."