Atlantic Health System to rev up balanced scorecard with SAS®

SAS® Performance Management for Healthcare delivers insight, alignment

16 June 2005 -  Leaders at Atlantic Health System, one of New Jersey's largest not-for-profit healthcare providers, have used a spreadsheet-based balanced scorecard for about eight years. This manual system has helped to shed light on problems in certain vital areas for a small number of users.

Administrators at Atlantic Health System, with hospitals in Morristown, Summit and Montclair/Glen Ridge in the US, recently decided to expand their balanced scorecard efforts with an automated system that provides advanced analytic and drill-down capabilities to hundreds of users throughout the organization. They selected SAS® Performance Management for Healthcare to provide the technology to fuel their success.

"We are completing a year-long, all-encompassing strategic planning process that has helped us to sharpen the focus of our balanced scorecard and to deliver the highest level of patient care," said Jack Scharf, vice president of quality and outcomes management for Atlantic Health System. "SAS Performance Management for Healthcare will transform our balanced scorecard into a strategic asset that can help us align every employee with our overall goals, track our key performance indicators and deliver insight into how key measures are related."

Decision makers at Atlantic Health System selected SAS for a number of reasons. SAS Performance Management for Healthcare provides a scorecard that will automatically refresh key metrics from six different organisational pillars: quality and safety, patient satisfaction, physicians, costs, growth and people. With a simple mouse click, the SAS system allows users to drill down into the data that influences each indicator and to see what trends are contributing to the overall metric. Also, SAS Performance Management for Healthcare allows users to map related goals and strategies in the scorecard and to then apply powerful analytic techniques to test assumptions about the links between them.

"We have been developing and improving our balanced scorecard for the better part of a decade," Scharf said. "As we take the next big step in our evolution by expanding the reach of our scorecards to every one of our 10,000 employees, it is critical for us to employ a system from a well-respected company that provides value. SAS has the resources and reputation to help us increase the benefits we derive from our balanced scorecard system."

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

Teams at several leading healthcare provider organizations employ SAS Performance Management for Healthcare to achieve quantifiable improvements in patient safety, clinical quality, physician engagement and employee satisfaction and retention. These providers include Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Virginia's Centra Health, Duke University Hospital, Maine Medical Center and Yale New Haven Health System.

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