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SAS International announces winner of Enterprise Intelligence 2005 Award22 June 2005 - SAS International today announced that University Hospital Aachen (UKA) was the winner of the Enterprise Intelligence 2005 Award. Presented annually at SAS Forum International, the largest enterprise business intelligence conference outside of the United States, this award is given to an organisation that has demonstrated productivity gains, cost or time savings, or achievement of organisation or business goals through the use of SAS® software. University Hospital Aachen (UKA) of Germany selected SAS Business Intelligence for its strategic management and cost control projects. UKA now has an enterprise wide SAS Strategic Performance Management information system in place that supports the executive board, clinical management and top doctors in their planning and decision making. The system enables UKA to make significant cost savings under the new billing and settlement system introduced last year in conjunction with Germany's healthcare reforms. It also optimises HR and resources management to improve efficiency. A core element of the management system is a balanced scorecard based on an enterprise wide SAS Data Warehouse, which provides the hospital's top decision makers with all the relevant facts and figures to perform their managerial tasks. The SAS Data Warehouse ensures consistent and correct data, an important precondition for successful strategic management, given that UKA has a variety of operational systems and departmental applications. So the SAS System's flexibility in data access, particularly with regard to extracting data out of SAP R/3 modules, was a key reason for the UKA's decision. With the new system, the flow of information has accelerated; whereas before SAS, it often took weeks to create a report, now the overwhelming majority of reports are ready in less than four hours. A core application area of the SAS implementation is clinical financial control – in particular the settlement of payments between the service provider (in this case, UKA) and the medical insurance companies that pay for treatment under the German system - the Krankenkassen. Since the recent healthcare reforms, which based the payments on individual care episodes, doctors have had to record treatment according to predefined categories. The quicker and more accurately they can do this, the sooner the hospital can bill its services to the Krankenkassen. Given that the UKA bills something in the order of €1 million per day, the SAS implementation makes a considerable financial impact by ensuring greater liquidity, thereby minimising losses on interest payments. Patients also profit directly from the analytical capabilities of the SAS solution. For example, analyses using SAS demonstrate weaknesses in the planning of operations, for example underutilisation of operating theatres. The solution enables UKA to increase efficiency, thereby reducing waiting times, while making more economic use of resources. "With SAS, we have placed our hospital wide information management on a completely new footing," says Volker Lowitsch, CIO, UKA. "Thanks to SAS, we are now communicating with a common language at UKA. We can see all the important performance data in virtually real time and we can have complete faith in the integrity and consistency of our information. The SAS System is highly reliable." Professor Dr. Walther Behrendt, Director of Clinical Financial Control at UKA adds, "Without SAS, management of the billing and management process at UKA would not have been possible to drive forward-looking and goal-oriented results. The classifications and data quality of these classifications improved tremendously, leading to significant cost advantages."
About University Hospital Aachen
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