BURLINGTON, MA, July 9, 2001—Vancouver Hospital & Health Sciences Centre (VHHSC), a major patient care, teaching, and research hospital in British Columbia, has implemented a business intelligence solution that answers some age-old questions surrounding hospital stays. "How long do our patients have to wait for surgery?" "How many patients are we currently treating?" "How long do our patients stay in hospital and how does this compare with other centers?" When faced with an imperative to streamline administrative processes and share information, VHHSC turned to Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSE: CSN), the leading provider of business intelligence solutions.

The integration of Cognos' business intelligence (BI) solution into VHHSC's quality utilization information support team (QUIST) system has enabled employees to drill down into data pertaining to admissions, discharges, average length of patient stays, patient satisfaction, surgical wait times, emergency room statistics, and number of patients per ward.

"Before deploying Cognos our analysts were consumed by lengthy manual processes to access and extract even the simplest information," said Sue Emmons, director, quality utilization information support team, VHHSC. "Now, information is readily available through the hospital's Intranet. Cognos' drill-down capabilities allow us to delve deep into our clinical and administrative data to see how effectively we are using hospital resources. Our system facilitates capture of information for monitoring the many aspects of the care, service and support we provide to patients."

VHHSC uses Cognos PowerPlay to create over 15 information cubes, each with analytical identifiers such as age, gender, ailment, and procedure. For example, the census cube facilitates identification of occupancy trends, seasonal activity variations, geographic location of patients, physician admission patterns and many other aspects of hospital operation. The Web-based solution allows employees to access information via a simple browser, reducing the requirement for IT assistance. The Cognos system is available to all employees at the VHHSC and used frequently by the Medical & Service Directors and Managers.

"By capturing and identifying critical intelligence in business data, Cognos provides organizations with the answers they need to better service their customers, patients, and constituents," said Alan Rottenberg, senior vice president, E-Applications Business Unit at Cognos. "Vancouver Hospital & Health Sciences Centre is an example of the larger market trend where both private and public sector organizations are choosing to deploy a business intelligence solution from Cognos to derive maximum value from their business data."

Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre
When it opened in 1886, Vancouver Hospital was just a nine-bed tent used to treat injured railway workers. Vancouver Hospital is composed of four sites: Vancouver General Hospital, UBC Hospital, GF Strong Rehab Centre and George Pearson Centre. In October 2000, the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board (V/RHB)merged with the Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, BC's leading acute care facility, to enhance integration between community and hospital services, and to improve access.

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