BusinessObjects Activity Based Costing is built on planning software that Business Objects gained last year from its acquisition of SRC Software Inc.
It is designed to help hospitals and medical institutions to integrate financial and patient data to determine the impact of costs on clinical service line profitability and performance.
Activity-based costing might have lost ground in the metrics world; but that shouldn’t diminish its importance in performance management. ABC is no longer being sold or implemented as a standalone application.
Rather, it’s becoming a foundation for more strategic, driver-based business measurement and analysis. The trend is for ABC modeling and analysis is to become a part of higher-level performance-focused applications like activity-based budgeting or customer/product profitability analysis.
The application also taps into SRC’s sharp focus on the healthcare sector and is the latest in a series of vertical application roll-outs planned by Paris-based Business Objects this year.
Last month Business Objects unveiled another vertically oriented analytic application aimed at the communications service providers. And earlier this year it released similar analytic applications for healthcare and life sciences development in concert with IBM Corp.
The healthcare industry is under siege, said Jay Spence, director of healthcare industry solutions at Business Objects. Costs continue to spiral out of control, while at the same time patients are often frustrated with slow moving processes and low quality of care.
There is a real need for activity based costing information in healthcare, but until now it was not widely available, said Dan Green, director of financial analysis and budget at Saint Mary’s Health Care, an early adopter of the software.
The 324-bed hospital turned to BusinessObjects’ activity based costing software to help quantify the costs of providing services to patients.
Using the Business Objects solution has put Saint Mary’s Health Care on the right path to analyze trends in cost-per-care for each particular product line or patient population. With this information, administrators can work with physicians and staff to reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of care.
Business Objects’ unveiled the ABC software the Healthcare Financial Management Association conference in Orlando, Florida this week.
