Business Intelligence Tool Means Healthy Data at UVA

We always say, "The technology is the easy part." The planning for and implementation of an enterprise 'business intelligence' system at the University of Virginia Department of Medicine certainly bears that out:

The rollout was a three-year effort--although what took most of the time wasn't the software installation itself. "The technology end is so easy that we rolled [WebFOCUS] out to the entire department at once," Zang said. Instead, the brunt of project time was spent creating business rules designating how the accounting data should be handled. That was a complex process because the two accounting systems that WebFOCUS accesses--Oracle Financials for the university, and a system called Epicor for outpatient billing by the School of Medicine--are set up to use different fiscal years and different general ledgers. "We had to figure out how to marry up the two," Zang explained.