Capio Healthcare UK (CHUK), is one of the leading providers of independent hospital services in England. With 21 widely dispersed hospitals, the group needed a simple way of coordinating Business Intelligence data for Head Office, Regional and Hospital managers. With three different hospital systems, coordination to a common standard was also difficult.

Bidetime developed a central Data Warehouse using Microsoft SQL Server to take extracted data from the hospital systems and merge it into a common format. Business Intelligence information is available using award winning BI tools from Cognos.

Tim Elsigood, Cheif Executive for CHUK stated:
"We knew we had a wealth of information in our hospital systems and we needed to use this information intelligently for management decision making. We wanted to consolidate the data and be able to analyse it across the group, to help set the business direction. We're tremendously excited about the programme; the quality of what you can do with the system is remarkable"

Howard Watkins, CHUK's Business Planning Manager, uses the group view PowerCubes for summary analysis as well as having access to detailed data using Cognos Impromptu. He says:
"It used to take a lot of time and enormous resources to gather data from the hospitals using traditional reporting methods. With the warehouse, we can prepare reports in a fraction of the time and with the BI tools we're able to take a group wide view of our operations, for example to show our business with specific insurers, or for specific treatments. Negotiating with the insurers is a lot easier now that we can analyse the impact of proposed changes in pricing or practice."

CHG Rivers, Sawbridgeworth

Each hospital system extracts data on activity, patient charges, billing, debtors, stock holdings and movements as well as key reference tables. These are transmitted to HQ by FTP or email over the Wide Area Network (WAN). Automated processes load and validate the data, then produce PowerPlay cubes for use at Head Office and for transmission to Regional and Hospital managers.

Approximately 400 files containing around a million records are loaded into the receipt process every run. The process imports the files, validates the contents and updates the main database. Over eighty PowerCubes are then automatically generated and collated into separate directories for each hospital and regional office. Monthly reporting processes are usually completed within one or two working days and hospital managers receive their cubes within three working days of the end of the period.