Spend Essentials Expands User Visibility Into Supply Chain Spend

Irving, TX (Marketwire) – For today’s health care organizations, analyzing and leveraging vast amounts of spend data presents a formidable challenge. Many health care leaders are employing business intelligence tools to help interpret the numbers so they can improve their supply chain processes and reduce costs. To assist in this process, VHA Inc., the national health care network, has introduced Spend Essentials, a new component to its comprehensive VHA LYNX™ suite of business intelligence resources. VHA LYNX provides a powerful business solution to support spend decisions and promote system-wide transparency; Spend Essentials combines member spend history with industry-leading contracts offered through Novation, VHA’s supply contracting company.

Spend Essentials’ users can pinpoint cost reduction and standardization opportunities. Results are delivered in 15 detailed, easy-to-understand and user-friendly dashboards available on any computer through proprietary web-based software. Views by individual facility, system and buyer facilitate transparency and efficiency across the organization. Spend Essentials integrates seamlessly into existing supply chain processes, aligning directly with health care systems’ specific needs.

“Spend Essentials’ capabilities reflect what our members have told us they want and need to improve their performance and succeed in the current health care environment,” said Scott Downing, VHA executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. “With this new VHA LYNX solution, members can truly maximize their contract portfolios, sorting and drilling down to see specific spend while improving efficiency throughout all of their purchasing activities. This transcends anything that currently exists in the market and will help make supply chain performance improvement easier to achieve at a time when hospitals are under intense pressure to manage costs.”

With the ability to dissect and analyze supply chain spend information alongside Novation’s industry-leading pricing, purchasing departments can easily identify and prioritize the largest cost reduction opportunities, Downing adds.
“The day after I attended training on Spend Essentials, I peeked into the system and found some immediate savings,” explained Steve Dana, senior purchasing agent for Watertown Regional Medical Center, Watertown, Wisc. “It showed there were two contracts where our volume had increased to the point that we qualified for the next tier. I requested the tier move on-line, which was instantly accepted. That click of a mouse will save us $5,000 a year. It was quick and easy. I am continuing to look into other contracts and individual items through this new solution.”

For more information on VHA LYNX and Spend Essentials call 800.842.5146 or email vhacustomerservice@vha.com.

About VHA Inc.
Based in Irving, TX, VHA Inc. is a national network of not-for-profit health care organizations that work together to drive maximum savings in the supply chain arena, set new levels of clinical performance, and identify and implement best practices to improve operational efficiency and clinical outcomes. Since 1977, VHA has leveraged its expertise in analytics, contracting, consulting and networks to help members achieve their operational, clinical and financial objectives. In 2011, VHA delivered record savings and value of $1.8 billion to members. VHA serves more than 1,350 hospitals and more than 30,000 non-acute care providers nationwide, coordinating delivery of its programs and services through its 15 regional offices. VHA has been ranked as one of the best places to work in healthcare by Modern Healthcare since the publication introduced this list in 2008.

SOURCE: VHA Inc.

Article source: http://www.supplychainmarket.com/doc.mvc/new-vha-lynx-business-intelligence-solution-accelerates-performance-0001?atc~c=771+s=773+r=001+l=a

NASHVILLE, Tenn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Anthem
Healthcare Intelligence, the leading provider of
software-as-a-service (SaaS) healthcare business intelligence (BI)
solutions and services, today announced it has re-branded under a new
company name, Agilum Healthcare Intelligence. Under the new brand,
Agilum has launched a refreshed brand identity, product structure and
website.

“With our recent company growth and implementation of expanded solutions
and services, it was time to adopt a new brand that reflected our
exclusivity in healthcare BI,” said Roy Mathews, founder and CEO at
Agilum. “Agilum’s new look encompasses our vision of simplicity and
technology-driven success, both of which we provide to hospital
executives through our solutions, helping them to better manage and
streamline operational and financial performance.”

The new brand design aims to reflect the company’s industry
differentiators through technology imagery, minimalistic design and
refreshed messaging. Founded in 2006, Agilum is the only existing
company to provide the Oracle
platform to healthcare organizations using a SaaS model, allowing small-
to mid-sized hospitals and healthcare systems to adopt affordable
business intelligence technology for a fixed monthly fee.

Agilum’s website offers visitors a simplified user interface for easy
access to detailed information about Agilum products as well as
educational resources around healthcare business intelligence. The
website also includes a brief video that further demonstrates how
Agilum’s technology captures data from disparate systems and transfers
it into dashboards and reports that provide actionable insight into an
organization.

Furthermore, Agilum has introduced a new product structure, streamlining
its previous solutions into four BI tools, including: Service Line
Costing Profitability, Revenue Cycle Performance, Operational
Performance and Productivity Manager. Each solution works separately to
provide transparency into a particular aspect of an enterprise or can be
combined for a complete view of the organization.

“As we move forward with our new brand and product structure, we are
better able to serve hospitals as they look to incorporate data
analytics and BI into daily operations and financial management,” said
Kevin McNamara, chairman at Agilum. “This campaign positions Agilum as a
business intelligence leader in the healthcare space.”

About Agilum:

Agilum Healthcare Intelligence provides business intelligence
applications created exclusively for the healthcare provider industry.
As experts in business intelligence and management reporting, Agilum
enables healthcare executives to understand critical information and
insight on improving their organization’s performance. Agilum products
are created by personnel who have decades of healthcare operations and
analytics background. Agilum is headquartered near Nashville, Tennessee,
USA.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthem-healthcare-intelligence-brands-company-140000238.html

LOUISVILLE, Colo., May 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — GHX announced the addition of a new business intelligence application to its portfolio of products aimed at cutting healthcare costs by simplifying supply chain operations through automation. Provider Intelligence, a new cloud-based application that measures and tracks supply chain metrics, provides hospitals with greater visibility into operational and financial performance.

Managing the multitude of products, supplies and contracts in the supply chain is complex and time consuming. Provider Intelligence uses interactive graphs and charting tools to visually represent key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling providers to better prioritize supply chain efforts and initiatives for increased utilization and cost savings. Without this data, it’s difficult for organizations to set performance goals, benchmark against peers, and assess where efforts are being wasted or money is being lost.

“The pressure to cut costs in healthcare is greater than ever, and for a hospital, knowing where you can improve efficiencies within your existing infrastructure is key,” said Derek Smith, executive vice president, Marketing and Product Management, GHX. “In a single tool, Provider Intelligence gives hospitals insight into how they are doing operationally and financially, and it helps them determine which suppliers are more efficient to do business with.”

Based on client-configurable KPIs, Provider Intelligence assembles a healthcare organization’s data and delivers it via graphs and charts through GHX My Exchange, the common platform where more than 4,000 providers transact and access their data. Providers can view performance over time, making it easier to identify trends and enabling providers to set relevant targets for their organizations, whether a single hospital or a large multi-hospital system.

“We use Provider Intelligence to measure performance across the 12 hospitals we support,” said John Martin, director of Hospital Services for Queensway Carleton Hospital and regional lead for Champlain Health Supply Services (CHSS). “By benchmarking against ourselves and peers, we saw that we needed to lower cost per PO and improve contract utilization. Since March 2011, we’ve increased our contract validation rate by more than 30 percent for improved contract utilization and a reduction in overall spend.”

Provider Intelligence allows organizations to measure, track and set goals based on the following:

• e-Commerce growth for the purchase order cycle
• Accounts payable automation through benchmarking and setting targets for electronic invoice trading partners
• Trading partner efficiencies by tracking e-Commerce exceptions (backorders, quantity, rejected, on hold, contract price, unit price, UOM, part number, not on PO and not on POA, recurring exceptions) with benchmarks and peer group experiences
• Contract utilization
• Off-contract spending in product areas with highest impact
• Product standardization opportunities through item classification
• Market pulse to track and be informed regarding the newest products entering the supply chain
• Productivity benchmarking within accounts payable and purchasing regarding lines processed and cost to manage the process

Provider Intelligence will be available to GHX customers in the U.S. and Canada this month. It will be demonstrated in the GHX booth (#200) this week at the VHA Leadership Conference, May 20-23 in Denver, Colo.

About GHX
Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC (GHX), a healthcare technology and services company, helps reduce the cost of doing business in healthcare by enabling better supply chain management. GHX makes it easier for hospitals, other healthcare providers and the suppliers that do business with them to drive cost and inefficiency out of their processes. Working with GHX, the healthcare organizations that make up the GHX Global Network are on track to save $5 billion by 2014—savings that can be invested in such things as hiring more nurses, providing care to uninsured children or developing new medical products. GHX is owned by organizations on both the buy and sell side of the healthcare supply chain, including some of the largest companies in the world. Find GHX on the Web, on Twitter @GHX_LLC and on Facebook @GHX.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ghx-launches-provider-intelligence-enhance-120000050.html

By Duane Barnhart | @dailydisrupt

Using embedded devices as part of an intelligent system can enable any organization to collect valuable data in new ways.  But once the information is available, how do you make sense of it all?  The world of intelligent systems is, after all, about using that data to make better decisions.

Although business intelligence software has progressed mightily from a decade ago when running reports required the help of the IT department, turning raw data into something useful for analysis is still often a team effort that can require a lot of legwork for administrators. Companies such as large retailers, manufacturers and logistics organizations are especially interested in finding a more elegant way to track business performance across complex networks of transactions and interactions.

According to Bryan Colyer of Redmond-based Extended Results — part BI consulting practice and part software developer — as more companies connect embedded devices and enterprise IT within intelligent systems, the need for applications that can turn that information into something usable is exploding.

“We’ve seen a strong need in retail, because so much of their information is in silos,” Colyer says. “But companies across industries are craving a way to help their corporate offices collaborate with stores and warehouses, to monitor the rhythm of the business and provide insight for better decisions.”

To help its clients solve this problem, Extended Results has developed an application called PushBI that is able to tap into almost any data source, from SQL Server and other databases to Excel spreadsheets and Web services. With business intelligence logic built on top and real-time operational data underneath, PushBI is able to deliver up-to-the-minute metrics on almost any type of data stream and deliver those reports to almost any device — meaning an executive can track performance by region, store or even by item or salesperson, right from a phone or Tablet PC.

“PushBI provides immediate reporting,” he says. “Before, someone would have to get the information and do analysis. With this, I can see my key metrics anywhere, anytime — and so can my store manager, my warehouse managers, my purchasers.”

With PushBI, data is presented in a graphical format that is easy to understand. Color coding draws immediate attention to problem areas such as stock-outs or lagging sales. For executives, Colyer says the ability to parse information and dial into specifics can really help in keeping tabs on a large organization.

“If I’m visiting stores in New York, I can dial into specific metrics for those stores,” he says. “I can see whether sales are trending up or down. Who are my top salespeople. I can see what’s selling, what’s not, and how that differs from store to store.”

At the store level, Colyer says, this capability can help with replenishment and optimizing shelf space. Store managers can easily communicate with the warehouse, ensuring inventory is available on time. Managers and executives can also track the effects of changes such as special promotions or new signage.

The PushBI application also features integrated IM chat functionality through Microsoft Lync. This allows executives, managers and subject experts such as accountants to discuss issues directly in the context of the application.

“As a senior exec, I can’t be an expert in every single number,” says Colyer. “But I can be connected to experts using Lync. With Lync’s presence information, I can see that my store manager in New York is present and have a quick IM or even start a videoconference.”

Colyer says the emerging market for intelligent systems has created the need for applications such as PushBI that can help companies put new data streams to work. As the market matures, Extended Results is seeing its customers around the world become more creative with the technology. One major global shipping company, for example, is using the product to optimize the offloading of containers at an Australian port.

“This market is still so new, most of our customers have an early adopter mindset and are looking for a competitive edge,” Colyer says. “We can’t wait to see what happens as more customers find new ways to leverage this technology. The ones who are doing this now are definitely getting ahead of the competition.”

Article source: http://www.dailydisruption.com/2012/05/pushbi-by-extended-results-business-intelligence-in-the-palm-of-your-hand/

Article source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ghx-launches-provider-intelligence-to-enhance-visibility-into-supply-chain-performance-2012-05-21

        Dodge Communications
        Leslie Kirk, 770-576-2576
        lkirk@dodgecommunications.com

Article source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/anthem-healthcare-intelligence-re-brands-company-as-agilum-healthcare-intelligence-2012-05-21

Over the years I’ve written quite a few posts about Google’s BI capabilities. Google never seems to get mentioned much as a BI tools vendor but to me it’s clear that it’s doing a lot in this area and is consciously building up its capabilities; you only need to look at things like Fusion Tables (check out these recently-added features), Google Refine and of course Google Docs to see that it’s pursuing a self-service, information-worker-led vision of BI that’s very similar to the one that Microsoft is pursuing with PowerPivot and Data Explorer.

Earlier this month Google announced the launch of BigQuery and I decided to take a look. Why would a Microsoft BI loyalist like me want to do this, you ask? Well, there are a number of reasons:

• It looked like fun.
• It’s actually described by Google themselves as an OLAP system here. I don’t agree with this classification – I think it’s better to describe it as an analytical database – but it was enough to make an old OLAP-fan like me curious. It’s also a column-store database. While it’s hardly a complete BI solution in itself it could easily be used as the back-end for one and I believe the French BI vendor BIME already support it as a data source.
• I’ve argued in the past the only reason that anyone would want to do cloud-based BI would be to scale way beyond whatever on premises hardware they could afford, and Google does make some impressive claims for its scalability: it should be able to provide quick response times for queries on terabytes of data. After all, if I can handle hundreds of millions of rows of data in PowerPivot on my laptop then I’m only going to be tempted to use a cloud-based solution if I need to work with much larger data volumes.
• It’s based on Dremel, and I’ve heard that one of the developers that works on Dremel is someone we used to know well in the world of Microsoft BI.

To test it out I thought I’d see how it handled the largest csv file I happened to have handy: a 1.2 GB dataset consisting of two integer columns and 86,220,856 rows. I wasn’t able to load the file direct into BigQuery because it was too large (small files you can load in direct), so I first had to upload it into Google Cloud Storage and then loaded it into BigQuery. The upload into Google Cloud Storage took about an hour, and once that was complete it took about 15 minutes to load it into BigQuery. Here’s the dialog for loading data into BigQuery – it’s pretty straightforward, as you can see:

The first query I ran was a simple count(*) to find the number of rows in the table, and that took a respectable 2.9 seconds:

Finding the number of distinct values in one of the columns was a little slower, at 3.9 seconds:

As was getting the sum of the values in a column, at 4.0 seconds:

While not astounding fast it, the fact that all these queries executed in under 5 seconds means that performance is good enough for ad hoc data analysis.

Next, I thought I’d have a crack at the problem that this dataset was actually intended for: the scenario described in this post on the Vertica blog from last year:

http://www.vertica.com/2011/09/21/counting-triangles/

Ignoring the my-technology-is-better-than-yours tone of this post, I thought this was an interesting problem: easy to understand but difficult to calculate quickly, and a good test for any product with pretensions to being a ‘big data’ platform. The two columns in the csv file are meant to represent the ids of members of a social network, and with each row representing a relationship between two people. The problem to solve is to find how many ‘triangles’ there are in the data, ie situations where person A has a relationship with person B, person B has a relationship with person C and person C also has a relationship with person A.

It was fairly easy to adapt the SQL in the blog post to the BigQuery syntax, the only slight problem being that it only supports joins between two tables at a time and so you have to use subselects:

select count(*)
from
(select
e2.Source as e2Source, e2.Destination as e2Destination,
e3.Source as e3Source, e3.Destination as e3Destination
from
(select * from [Edges.EdgesFull]) as e2
join
(select * from [Edges.EdgesFull]) as e3
on e2.destination = e3.source
where e2.source e3.source) as e4
join
(select * from [Edges.EdgesFull]) as e1
on e1.destination = e4.e2source
and e4.e3destination = e1.source
where e1.source e4.e2source

On a small test dataset everything worked OK, but on the full dataset I ran the query and… got an error:

Reading the small print in the docs I realised I’d run into the following limitation:

BigQuery provides real-time query performance for JOIN statements where one of the two sides is small. Here small means less than 8MB of compressed data; compression rates vary, but are usually in the range of 2-10X as compared to the corresponding CSV. We expect this 8MB limit to continue to increase over time. For simplicity, we always require the table on the right side of any JOIN clause to be small. Outer joins with a small table on the “outer” side are unsupported, which means that we only support left outer joins.

Clearly my entire table was going to be much more than this limit. I had a go at filtering the data so that the first column was less than 2000 (the max value in each column is 4,847,570) and that worked, returning in 23.1 seconds:

select count(*)
from
(select
e2.Source as e2Source, e2.Destination as e2Destination,
e3.Source as e3Source, e3.Destination as e3Destination
from
(select * from [Edges.EdgesFull] where source2000) as e2
join
(select * from [Edges.EdgesFull] where source2000) as e3
on e2.destination = e3.source 
where e2.source e3.source) as e4
join
(select * from [Edges.EdgesFull] where source2000) as e1
on e1.destination = e4.e2source
and e4.e3destination = e1.source 
where e1.source e4.e2source
   

A bit disappointing, but maybe this is a problem more suited to Pregel than Dremel? Certainly in more traditional OLAP scenarios when you need to join a fact table to a dimension table, many dimension tables will be smaller than 8MB when compressed so this limitation wouldn’t be such an issue.

Overall I was impressed with the performance and ease-of-use of BigQuery, and I’ll be interested to see how it develops in the future and integrates with the rest of the Google stack (it’s already possible to hook it up to Google docs with a bit of coding). I will, of course, be equally interested to see what Microsoft’s cloud BI and Office strategy comes up with to counter this.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/Cpjz/~3/QiNrSnoROOI/