Enterprise Portals

Healthcare organizations operate in a complex and competitive environment to provide quality services in their communities. Amidst the struggle to meet the growing needs of an aging population, these companies balance the weight of increased regulatory requirements and declining reimbursement with the obligation to consistently improve the efficacy of their service. Performance improvement initiatives exist in nearly every organization, yet these programs rarely correlate with strategic objectives or provide meaningful data to facilitate timely decisions. In response to this challenge, new software solutions emerged to enable companies to "translate strategies into plans, monitor execution and provide insight in order to manage and improve financial and operational performance" (Hyperion, 2005, Business Issues §, pg. 2).

Dashboards, scorecards and enterprise reporting solutions comprise the bulk of these new technologies, providing a visual summary of business metrics and key performance indicators (KPI). Hyperion characterizes dashboards as "personalized, adaptive, graphical displays of tactical metrics that provide executives and key decision makers with a relevant overview of drillable data, with immediate clarity on the state of the business as appropriate to the individual's role". Id. Business Issues §. This 'at-a-glance' view communicates the strategy of the organization while succinctly measuring its' ability to implement the associated goals. However, a broad range of management reports based on integrated data across the healthcare enterprise are necessary to complement a dashboard in providing the insight needed to drive measurable improvements in operational performance.

An enterprise portal typically integrates many of these business intelligence tools, providing employees and management with role defined access to a secure repository of the operational and financial information necessary to predict and respond to change, improve organizational communication and efficiency, and to monitor performance toward goals (Shutt, 2003). Wikipedia defines an enterprise portal as "a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries". Some of the key features include collaboration, business intelligence reporting, content and document management, education and training, search and navigation, and business process management (Wikipedia, 2007). Yahoo, MSN and AOL are common examples of portals. In the late 1990's, Shared Healthcare Systems (SHS) recognized the potential value of these web-based tools for post-acute healthcare providers in the rehabilitation and long term care (LTC) market segments. The subsequent development of the enterprise software applications, Cypress and Orcas, for these segments created the necessary architecture for capturing the vast amounts of clinical and financial information summarized in real-time and presented to customers within the portal framework.

The enterprise portal associated with these products enabled organizations to monitor KPI's associated with their strategic objectives while controlling costs, reducing operational inefficiencies, improving productivity and delivering quality care. These effects were the result of providing real-time information related to clinical and financial operations that facilitated timely decision making and focused the employees and management on goals necessary