Intelligent Enterprise

Business Objects on Monday unveiled performance management software for the healthcare industry.

Activity Based Costing for Healthcare provides a framework for collecting and reporting costs and margins on a per-patient basis to help organizations analyze the information by physician, across service lines or by health maintenance organization (HMO) contract.

As a result, clinical managers can use the software to better understand and manage the costs associated with patient care, and healthcare executive can access performance reporting and dashboards that can help improve strategic and operation decision-making, company officials said.

Highlights of the new application include an intuitive user interface, and easily updated models to reflect changes in procedures, processes or costs. In calculating patient costs, flexible overhead allocation methods support both traditional step-down and direct to patient allocations.

Reporting capabilities are fully integrated with Microsoft Corp.'s Excel, and users can incorporate external benchmark data and compare to internal standards, officials said.

Activity Based Costing for Healthcare is available now. Early adopters of the software include Cascade Healthcare Community Inc., and Saint Mary's Health Care.

Business Objects has its North American headquarters in San Jose, Calif.