"Monarch mines data from our existing reports produced by MEDITECH and Lawson. Our end users are able to easily work with the data they need... Even better, we have gained new strategic insight into our healthcare data, which would have been far more difficult, if possible at all, without Monarch."

 

Los Angeles-based Good Samaritan Hospital is more than a community hospital with over 400 beds; it is an academic medical center affiliated with the USC Keck School of Medicine, providing world-class diagnostic, surgical and therapeutic care. Good Samaritan manages its hospital and business operations using the MEDITECH Healthcare Information System and Lawson Financial System, respectively. The hospital has gained new operational and strategic business benefits from these systems, thanks to Monarch, the report mining and data analysis solution from Datawatch. We spoke with members of Good Samaritan's Information Systems (IS) team on the hospital's impressive Monarch accomplishments.

"Monarch may well be the easiest, most reliable solution to gain new business value from enterprise systems like MEDITECH and Lawson," says Craig Bremner, IS Revenue Projects Leader for Good Samaritan Hospital. "Monarch mines data from the existing reports produced by MEDITECH and Lawson. Our end users are able to easily work with the data they need, sourced from reports, alone or in combination with other data sources."

"Even better, we have gained new strategic insight into our healthcare data, which would have been far more difficult, if possible at all, without Monarch."

One popular use of Monarch within Good Samaritan Hospital is the transformation of Lawson accounting reports into customized data to expedite accounting operations and financial reporting to hospital departments. "We run General Ledger reports from the Lawson system, as well as reports from related Lawson modules, and mine the data from these reports using Monarch," says Charito Antonio, IS Finance Projects Leader for Good Samaritan Hospital. "This customized data is then used by our accounting team to perform month-end closing reconciliations, balancing and auditing. Because no time is wasted chasing down needed accounting data, Monarch cut our month-end reporting process from a week to three hours!"

Monarch is also used to produce the hospital's monthly financial operating reporting package by department. "We mine data from reports from Lawson's Accounts Payable, Inventory Control, and Purchase Order modules," says Charito. "This data is then used to provide the hospital's various departments with a complete Monthly Operational Report in Excel. Thanks to Monarch, department managers can combine, sort and categorize the data to get the specific information they need to better manage their department's operations."

While other technology solutions exist to coax data out from the Lawson system into Excel, the Good Samaritan IS team has found no alternative solution rivaling Monarch's low cost and sheer simplicity. "Monarch remains the quickest and easiest way to bring Lawson-based data into Excel. Monarch is user-friendly enough even for the technology beginner," Charito says.

Monarch has been used with even greater effect with Good Samaritan's MEDITECH reports, deriving new business intelligence from the MEDITECH system without complex programming.

"Perhaps the most successful strategic use of Monarch here at Good Samaritan has been our new ability to analyze and manage our operating room resources," Craig says. "Before Monarch, we struggled to effectively manage the utilization of operating rooms and surgeon's time. The data necessary to do this is not easily accessible from our MEDITECH database, which is proprietary. Some needed databases are not easily joined together using the MEDITECH report writer."

"Thanks to Monarch, we have dramatically improved the utilization of our operating rooms... and better manage surgeon time and resources... This kind of resource efficiency is talked about a lot in the healthcare community. With Monarch, we are achieving it."

Michele Clark, Revenue Business Analyst, adds, "Instead, we simply run certain reports from MEDITECH's scheduling module, containing data for surgeries already scheduled, by location, by surgeon. We then bring those reports into Monarch Pro. Then, in conjunction with Monarch's powerful calculated fields, we are able to report on room utilization, block time usage and estimated times for various surgical procedures. The flexibility of Monarch to integrate data from other sources results in a customized, consolidated dataset in Monarch. We can then analyze, filter, and summarize the data in a variety of ways to maximize the efficiency of our operating room resources. "

"Thanks to Monarch, we have dramatically improved the utilization of our operating rooms, and can more easily match available surgeons with required upcoming procedures and better manage surgeon time and resources. Our patients are receiving the outstanding standard of care they expect, while we make the most of our surgical resources. This kind of resource efficiency is talked about a lot in the healthcare community. With Monarch, we are achieving it."

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