AUSTIN HEALTH SELECTS BUSINESS OBJECTS TO INCREASE COST EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CAPABILITIES

Australia - 10 October 2003: Austin Health has chosen Business Objects as its enterprise wide Business Intelligence solution.

Peter McDonald, Executive Director at Austin Health and leader of the project team said, "We selected Business Objects because we found it to be the most comprehensive industry offering and provided the ease of use we demanded whilst still representing the best value for money".

Austin is a leading Melbourne metropolitan health service employing some 5000 staff with over 72,000 patient admissions and almost 40,000 emergency attendances in 2002/3. Austin was seeking a single BI tool to cover its data analysis and performance monitoring requirements, from clinical costing to patient-based analytics. Austin is also the first hospital in Victoria to offer its management team unprecedented capacity to manage performance through utilisation of Business Objects Dashboard technology.

Jennifer Williams, CEO at Austin Health said "we initiated the project because we have long been frustrated knowing the information we need to manage more effectively is there but we couldn't get at it easily, we simply couldn't find anything". "With Business Objects in place across the Hospital, we expect up to date and accurate information will be available to appropriate staff members on demand, enabling both improved services and real cost savings".

Dr Craig White, Austin's Chief Medical Officer and Director of Acute Services added "the ability to statistically test data in a controlled knowledge management environment will allow us to advance 'evidence based' practice. We can test 'what we think to be the case' against actual clinical data sets. Learning through analysis is the key to improvement in all aspects of healthcare provision. Better capacity to effectively interrogate our data can only mean performance improvement across the hospital".

Business Objects will be deployed via the hospital's web-based intranet with users having the capability to run pre-defined reports or create their own ad-hoc reports. This managed 'easy to use' environment will significantly improve Austin's 'time to value' by distributing report creation down to individual business units. Austin expects that the whole environment will be supported by as few as 5 or 6 experts in Business Objects technology.

Areas to be covered by the implementation include a new comprehensive reporting and analysis mechanism supporting MedTrak, Austin's new Patient Administration System, diagnostics in pharmacy, radiology and pathology, clinical costing and financials from the highly successful implementation of Microsoft's Great Plains accounting system.

The system will also support analysis of data from the hospitals payroll systems supplied by ADP. Peter McDonald said "Business Objects will work across all of our applications and technology platforms meaning all of the data across all departments is accessible and available to all staff, in a controlled and secured environment-data utopia!!"

Brenton Smith, Managing Director of Business Objects ANZ said "in working with Austin we didn't just want another customer, we were seeking to partner with a 'thought leader' to develop a world class business intelligence environment in a modern hospital.
A significant part of the value of this transaction to us is that we have reached agreement with Austin Health to showcase Business Objects technology to other Victorian and Australian hospitals. This is a visionary initiative and we are delighted to be a partner in a relationship with so much potential to improve healthcare across Australia.