DALLAS, Feb. 14, 2005 -- When the 2005 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition opened here today, industry experts from SAS showed visitors to Booth #7428 what ever-increasing numbers of healthcare providers are realizing every day: SAS is the leading provider of performance management software that improves the quality of clinical care and strengthens the financial well-being of healthcare provider organizations.

Attendees will get further validation of the SAS approach from SAS' principal healthcare strategist Melissa Fitzpatrick, RN, MSN, FAAN, when she explains the benefits of performance management in her presentation, "Create an Evidence-Based Practice Culture with Business Intelligence," on Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 1 p.m. in room D-221.

"With an explosion of IT solutions for healthcare providers that includes electronic medical records and computerized physician order entry systems - not to mention IT systems supporting finance, human resources, planning, quality and risk management, and other operational areas - healthcare providers are facing a data epidemic," said Kecia Serwin, general manager of SAS Health & Life Sciences. "Performance management is a powerful and effective way for healthcare executives to derive intelligence from IT systems throughout their facilities that can break down political barriers, overcome resistance to change, align strategic priorities and improve communication."

SAS(R) Performance Management for Healthcare enables organizational leaders to focus, communicate and collaborate on strategy and then to turn those strategies into action. With SAS Performance Management for Healthcare, executives can implement balanced scorecards, Six Sigma or other quality frameworks to integrate traditional business data, like revenues and profits, with intangible measures such as the satisfaction of their patients, employees and physicians. SAS allows decision makers to communicate and measure, at an enterprise level, the degree of strategic alignment and the progress toward desired outcomes.

Several leading healthcare provider organizations have implemented SAS Performance Management for Healthcare to achieve quantifiable improvements in patient safety, clinical quality, physician engagement and employee satisfaction and retention. These providers include Brigham and Women's Hospital, Virginia's Centra Health, Duke University Hospital, Maine Medical Center and Yale New Haven Health System.

Powerful software, proven results

Maine Medical Center illustrates the issues facing healthcare systems today and the benefits that performance management software from SAS can help achieve. The 606-bed tertiary care and teaching hospital in Portland, Maine, uses a computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system that has already produced impressive results by decreasing medical errors, increasing decision support, promoting evidence-based medicine and establishing a higher standard of care. SAS Performance Management for Healthcare builds on the success of Maine Medical Center's CPOE system by measuring, monitoring and analyzing clinical and business performance through a scorecard that is widely shared and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

"It is tremendously important to get these scorecards into the hands of everyone involved in patient care so they can see the improvements that are possible and understand the steps they can take every day to improve patient health," said George L. Higgins III, MD, FACEP, chief medical officer and vice president for medical affairs at Maine Medical Center.

Currently, Maine Medical Center leaders measure a total of 60 key performance indicators (KPIs) pulled from systems all across the hospital, from research and education to finance and human resources. More than 250 hospital managers can examine these KPIs through scorecards displayed on a standard Web browser, and plans are underway to distribute them to every one of the facility's 5,000 employees. Maine Medical Center's KPIs are measured against national benchmarks or internally generated targets to assure that clinicians are providing the best care possible. When the hospital consistently beats the industry averages, standards are raised to encourage further improvement. "Every time we can raise the bar, we save lives," Higgins said.

One example of the improvements driven by SAS software is a decrease in patient falls. Maine Medical employs patient beds specifically engineered to decrease the risk of falls, and staff in the units where these beds are used effectively have dramatically reduced patient fall rates. By monitoring patient fall rates in a scorecard, the teams that are lagging behind can meet with the teams that are excelling to discuss strategies that work. As an added bonus, nursing units showing a dramatic improvement receive a tremendous morale boost when their success is displayed on the scorecard for everyone to see.

"Performance management is a very dynamic process, and the more we demonstrate our system, the more we find the appetite and enthusiasm for it growing," Higgins said. "Performance management is a great tool to help us drive quality improvement and safety improvement across Maine Medical Center."

SAS promotes expanded view of performance management

While many analysts and software vendors struggle to define the scope of performance management, SAS has adopted an all-encompassing view that goes beyond strategy, planning and finance to include customer behavior, supplier spending and human capital deployment. Only SAS provides an entire suite of powerful, integrated solutions on the SAS(R)9 Intelligence Platform to redefine performance management by sparking key insights into every aspect of healthcare.

Analysts agree. Last August, Butler Group, an independent IT research and analysis organization based in the UK, placed SAS in the lead position in the performance management market. SAS was awarded best-in-class capability in the Planning, Monitoring, Reporting and Data Management categories.

For more information about SAS Performance Management for Healthcare, please visit http://www.sas.com/industry/healthcare/spm/.

About SAS

SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500(R) - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know(R). Visit us at http://www.sas.com.

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SOURCE SAS Institute Inc.

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