• Substantial gains in productivity
• Faster and better financial reporting
• Better overall business management

Regency Hospital Company, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, operates a network of 19 long-term acute care (LTAC) hospitals across the country. Regency provides services to medically complex patients who have suffered recent catastrophic illnesses or injuries and require an extended length of stay in an acute care environment, typically longer than two or three weeks.

Challenge

The company uses Computer Programs and Systems, Inc. (CPSI) to handle the operations and materials management of its hospitals, and until recently its corporate financial operations as well.
Regency experienced very rapid growth early in its history increasing their need for enterprise wide consolidated reporting. With its current technology, Regency had no effective way to consolidate information across its system, and it was very limited in its ability to enlarge its financial reporting capabilities as the company grew. Instead, Regency was creating numerous reports manually outside its financial software system. As a result, the delivery of information was slow and labor intensive with the potential for data integrity issues.

Solution

To resolve these issues, Regency called on Georgia-based OmniVue Business Solutions, a Microsoft Certified Partner with extensive experience in the healthcare industry. OmniVue recommended Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) software, which could integrate all of Regency's financial data and reporting needs and could support many third-party modules that were available to fit the specific requirements of the hospital business. OmniVue implemented GP on a SQL Server 2000 platform, and is adding Business Portal (using SQL Server 2005) to their existing Microsoft SharePoint portal to improve collaboration and information access for all 19 locations from a unified server.

"Great Plains, for us, had a lot going for it," said Regency Hospital Company Vice President of Information Services, Micah Laughlin. "In almost every consideration category, it was the clear choice."

Regency particularly appreciated the value of SQL Server as the foundation to build an open-architecture for the company's financial information system, selecting SQL over Oracle, DB2 and other proprietary databases. SQL offered the scalability to grow as the network expanded and a lower total cost of ownership than competing solutions. Moreover, the company could find IT professionals with SQL skills more easily than those specializing in other database systems, reducing the time and challenges of managing the IT department and avoiding the high support costs of systems like Oracle DB.

OmniVue deployed Dynamics GP in just a few months. "The ability to implement quickly with best practices with a reasonable amount of effort and in our time frame was a primary consideration," Laughlin noted.

Benefits

With its Microsoft solution, the Regency IT Department was able to focus on not just automating the information process, but improving it; and today Regency is enjoying substantial gains in productivity as well as better audit controls. Financial reporting is faster and better. The system provides Regency with more detailed information, enabling directors to manage the business more effectively. Regency anticipates that the more timely information delivered to each department manager through Dynamics GP will produce an easier, smarter and more accurate budgeting process. Regency has discovered that Dynamics GP actually has improved how information is used to run the company.

"The biggest impact is how operating out of a single database has brought the business functions of our departments together," Laughlin reports. "We no longer operate in silos."

He also notes that Regency is adding processes and controls to its system to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, and "these tools are enabling us to get there with the minimum of extra overhead. They allow us to get to information more quickly, especially from an audit perspective."

With the combination of Dynamics GP, SharePoint and the coming addition of BusinessPortal, Regency will be able to communicate information to its staff more quickly. Moreover, the system's familiar, intuitive interface will reduce the need for custom reports for end-users by putting information at their fingertips.

"I think we've only scratched the surface," Laughlin predicts. "I think we will continue to see these kinds of improvements throughout every department."

Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what's most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.