Caché-based Application from QuadraMed Provides Outstanding ROI to Healthcare Institutions
Key Benefits
- Cost-effectiveness
- Manageability
- High Performance
In recent years, rocketing costs have required healthcare professionals to pay more attention to the business aspects of providing care. Increasingly, caregivers have to think like accountants, scrutinizing every improvement with regards to its return on investment. This new attitude can represent a challenge to healthcare application providers. QuadraMed Corporation, of San Rafael, CA, more than meets the challenge by basing their solutions on Caché.
“There are two ways we maximize the ROI of our software solutions,” says Frank Pecatis, Senior Vice President of Sales at QuadraMed, a leading vendor of healthcare applications. “One is to minimize our customers’ investment by streamlining the installation process. The other is to increase their return by continually providing products that help them do their jobs efficiently and effectively. With the Caché database engine powering our applications, we can do both.”
A case in point is QuadraMed’s Affinity Healthcare Information System, an application that employs InterSystems’ Caché database to integrate clinical, financial, and patient information. QuadraMed recently installed Affinity at Genesis Healthcare System in southeastern Ohio. Genesis, an integrated network of 2,000 healthcare professionals, manages two hospitals and several clinics, serves over a quarter of a million people, and had 20 years of legacy data to port to the Affinity environment. QuadraMed completed the installation in only nine months – thanks in part to Caché’s easy manageability. “Our experience with HIS installs is that they typically take 12 to 18 months,” says Ed Romito, CIO at Genesis. “Clearly, the Caché technology helped make the compressed install possible…overall, this is the smoothest install I’ve ever been through.”
And since Genesis went live with Affinty, the feedback from the user population has been very positive. According to Romito: “They’ve gone from a legacy system where day-end processing took six hours to a QuadraMed Affinity and Caché-based infrastructure, where that same processing is complete in about an hour. We have a system that users love and back-end database technology that IT loves…it doesn’t get much better.”
"[Our users have] gone from a legacy system where day-end processing took six hours to a QuadraMed Affinity and Caché-based infrastructure, where that same processing is complete in about an hour. We have a system that users love and back-end database technology that IT loves...it doesn't get much better."
--Ed Romito
CIO
Genesis Healthcare Systems
Another QuadraMed customer that is getting an outstanding return from their investment in Affinity is the Memorial Medical Center in Ashland, Wisconsin. Les Whiteaker, Chief Financial Officer at Memorial Medical Center (MMC), calls the payback impressive from both clinical and financial perspectives. “Since rolling out the Affinity Patient Accounting applications, we’ve been able to cut accounts receivable (A/R) wait time from 80 to about 58 days – more than 30% on average. That decrease translates to substantially improved cash flow. And that means we can better focus on care delivery.” Whiteaker notes that the success of the hospital’s IT strategy made it easier for MMC to make its recent acquisition of a state-of-the-art MRI machine.
MMC also credits QuadraMed’s Affinty software and Caché Web technology for efficiencies within clinical operations: doctors spend less time on administrative matters, redundant lab tests are eliminated, and decision-makers have faster access to more and better information. “Easy access to Web-based information has clearly resulted in improvements in overall care delivery,” says Whiteaker.
When MMC chose Affinity, they knew it would provide an excellent ROI both now, and in the future. CIO Todd Reynolds explains: “Our technical staff is very small in proportion to the size and complexity of the systems we’re running today. That not only highlights the manageability of Affinity and Caché but also lays the groundwork for future expansion with an infrastructure we’re confident can easily scale upwards to meet new requirements.”
"Healthcare is a business demanding quality and efficiency" says Frank Pecaitis of QuadraMed. Caché's reliability, scalability, speed, and manageability help us meet these mission critical demands by enhancing the value of our application".