Patient Satisfaction Enhanced With Business Intelligence Technology

Market Wire, July, 2008

In the newly released benchmark report "Business Intelligence in Healthcare: Have Providers Found a Cure?," Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), found that Best-in-Class organizations achieved a 15% increase in patient satisfaction scores through the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and analytical tools. This study collected data from nearly 100 healthcare providers and found that these organizations are increasingly deploying BI tools in the hospital in order to combat the challenges of rising healthcare costs and the pressing need to enhance patient care.

Prior Aberdeen research revealed that healthcare organizations have been hesitant to deploy analytical tools, lagging behind industry norms in both adoption and maturity of BI implementations. The challenge many hospitals face is making sense of a tangled web of disparate back-end data sources. Showing a lucid connection between analytical capability and enhanced quality of care is often a complicated task. Through the use of BI and analytical tools, healthcare organizations have been able to leverage financial and clinical data in order to better manage patient flow, streamline their operations, and deliver an elevated standard of patient care. Best-in-Class organizations have been able to achieve these performance improvements through an efficient combination of organizational capability and technology enablers such as HIS (Hospital Information Systems). Drawing on a solid foundation of organizational capability the Best-in-Class were able to drive an 11% reduction in overtime incurred, a stark contrast to all other organizations that experienced a 7% increase in overtime incurred.

"Historically, many healthcare provider organizations have taken a 'best-of-breed' approach when selecting software to run mission-critical systems. This has resulted in systems that, while strong in the execution of their intended tasks, are not capable of producing easily integrated data for analysis across multiple areas of the hospital," explains David Hatch, Research Director for the Business Intelligence practice at Aberdeen Group. "This has resulted in the need for added IT resources in order to overcome the complex data integration tasks that must be accomplished. While this investment may seem daunting, interviews with respondents have revealed that the ends justify the means. Best-in-Class companies are likely to have the highest investment in IT resources."

The report is aimed at educating the end-user community as to how Best-in-Class organizations are building a strong portfolio of organizational capability and leveraging a suite of technology enablers to bring about marked improvements in patient satisfaction and overtime incurred. The report recommends clear actions for Industry Average and Laggard organizations to achieve these types of performance improvements and draw closer to the Best-in-Class.

A complimentary copy of this report is made available due in part by the following underwriters: Dimensional Insight, eThority, Infor, and QlikTech. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=4900 .

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen(TM) for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com .

© 2008 Aberdeen Group, Inc., a Harte-Hanks Company
451 D Street, Suite 710
Boston, Massachusetts  02210-1928
Telephone: (617)854-5200
Fax: (617) 723-7897
 www.aberdeen.com 

Media Contact: David Hatch Aberdeen Harte-Hanks (617) 854-5329 David.hatch@aberdeen.com