Women & Infants' Hospital, a Providence, RI specialty hospital within Care New England, had been running Kreg's eBudgeting solution for over four years. Ros Forget, Budget Manager, recently told of her experience using Kreg's latest product. "We recently installed the new D2D add-on system which allows us to deliver primary, secondary and even tertiary detail with drill down capabilities in our existing Kreg-generated variance reports. To say the system was well received would be an understatement.

During an early session to educate our department managers and VP's on D2D we arrived at the Hospital five minutes before the session and the room was already filling up. As we prepared for our presentation the room kept filling up to the point we were at "standing room only" status – usually we don't get this type of response to our meetings but the word was out in our organization on Kreg's latest product and people were eager to see what they were to be receiving. The minute we opened a report and clicked on one expense subaccount which automatically displayed detailed GL transactions tied to the account we had many comments like "Oh my goodness" and "this is just what we need".

As we progressed with our meeting the enthusiasm in the room could not be contained and before we finished this someone asked if they could get this information on the grant reports generated by Kreg as well – we showed them a D2D enabled grants report as our finale. One manager stated that the ability to drill down in the DPR (departmental performance review) while reviewing expenses saves her time and alerted her to excessive spending habits and overtime of staff. Being able to see this immediately enabled her to instantly alert staff to cut spending on certain items as well as monitor overtime of several staff. To further her point she told us that she believes this software does not cost, it pays! I honestly believe the people in the room were more excited than we were and at the end of the presentation we got applauded for this - another thing that has never happened before and we could not have done it without the Kreg system."

“We received tremendous value from Kreg’s products. They are incredibly easy to use and more cost-efficient than any other alternative available in the market. Specifically, their programs aid in managing our institution better. For example, the Contract Management system helps us match up payments received against the negotiated terms of the managed care providers so we can more effectively manage accounts receivable. The reporting is so flexible; we can do costing by department, by individual unit of service, by a common medical problem or by a specific physician. Kreg provides great products and service.” - CEO, Connecticut Hospital

“I was a user of WinCMA for four years. During that time we transitioned to new financial software that was incompatible with WinCMA. As a result we upgraded to Kreg’s EV-CMA system which provides many improvements over WinCMA. The adaptability of the system to convert 837 files where each claim has a Unique Claim Record Number (UCRN) to a common account number is probably one of the most important features for our Hospital. Another positive is the increased ease of building contracts. Contracts that used to be over 45 segments are now 5 or 6 clauses and contracts with several fee schedules that had to be imported over and over only need to be added to the system once. The decrease in contract building time is a significant time saver, freeing up more time for reviewing variances. The increased functionality in reporting is another feature that we’ve come to enjoy, especially the ability to link to the claim details/vouchers from the report. Another time saving feature is the faster recalculation of claims when a change is made to a contract. We are just finishing our initial build of EV-CMA and look forward to using the system to identify payment variances.” – Sandra Maynard - Contract Management Analyst, Southern New Hampshire Medical Center

“I don’t know how a hospital can exist without the access to the kind of information provided to us via the Kreg EnterpriseVision suite of products. With the constant shifts in healthcare, how can you survive without information? Kreg provides so much key information; we use it for marketing purposes, developing new business and responding to legislative issues. We’ve used the Kreg software to validate decreases or increases in length of stay, grant writing, negotiating contracts and the impact of new Medicare rules on our facility. Ultimately good patient outcome is the desired end result. If we find a change in practice of length of stay does not contribute to a better patient outcome, we need to change our practice. We use this information every day.” – Manager of Revenue Enhancement, New Jersey Hospital

“EnterpriseVision enabled us to distribute financial information to the department heads in a timelier manner versus using interoffice mail. They could access and evaluate their budget against actual forecasts earlier in the cycle and make adjustments sooner to contribute to the overall financial success of our organization.” – Budget Manager, Crozer-Keystone Health Network

Randolph Hospital, located in Asheboro NC, has been a long time user of all of the Kreg systems. Loretta Long, the Director of Decision Support at the Hospital, gave a presentation at our recent Executive Conference in Naples about how they use the Patient Level Management system (PLM) for many different many purposes. She said “it is the Hospital’s policy to request data from the Decision Support department rather than the Information Technology department. PLM will provide the data quicker and saves IT time in writing reports so it is a win-win situation.”

Listed below are the many types of reports and analyses they use PLM for on a daily basis:

• Hospital Licensure Application
• AHA Survey
• North Carolina Advocacy Needs Data Initiative Survey
• Medicare / Medicaid Cost Report
• Planning
• Profitability
• Managed Care Analysis and Planning
• Chargemaster Audit and Review
• Employer Data Analysis
• Departmental Data
• State CON Applications
• Internal Quality Team (s) Support
• Case Mix Index Tracking
• OIG Compliance Analysis
• Cost Analysis
• Equipment Planning
• Resource Consumption Analysis
• Data Submission to Other Databases (Premier, Solucient)
• Insurance Follow-up – Identifying No Pay Accounts
• Payment Detail by CPT Code
• Identifying Payments Posted in a Certain Time Period by Insurance Company
• Pulling Data by Ordering Physician for a CMA Audit on Overuse/Appropriate Use of Lab Tests

Chilton Memorial Hospital, located in Pompton Plains, NJ, has been using Kreg’s eBudgeting & Management Reporting solution for years. A recent upgrade that included the latest “Drill to Detail” solution has taken the Kreg system to even higher levels.

“Drill to Detail has greatly improved the information distribution in many ways. Formerly, it took almost two full days per month to assemble and distribute the multiple sources of reports and data required. Our end users – Department Heads, Managers and Administrators - had a hard time finding and accessing some information such as year to date payables by vendor with invoice detail in a format they could utilize, it was all hard copy.

With Drill to Detail the assembly and distribution of the information is automated. Jobs are scheduled to run when appropriate. The information can be on the end users desktop within a half an hour of the close. We are saving days of manpower using electronic distribution. Another obstacle solved by working with Kreg was Chilton, like many organizations, uses different vendors for general ledger and payroll which at times is confusing to many of our end users. With Kreg, people don’t worry about whether the information came from payroll or AP or general ledger as it is all in one centralized location.” – Anna Dunitz - Manager of Accounting, Chilton Memorial Hospital

The North Bronx Healthcare Network (NBHN), one of six regional networks established by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, consists of Jacobi Medical Center, North Central Bronx Hospital and affiliated community health care centers.

NBHN installed the Kreg solution in 2006 to improve their budget process, streamline financial reporting and centralize reports so that staff will have one access point for pertinent data and information. From a successful initial installation, the Kreg solution has been delivering outstanding benefits, capabilities and, most importantly, results to both Jacobi Medical Center and North Central Bronx Hospital for the past two years.

NBHN has utilized the Kreg systems for many of their financial reports that they say would otherwise have been impossible with a limited staff of two people. Automated report bursting, paperless budgeting, and detailed Personal Services analyses by title have enabled the North Bronx Healthcare Network to analyze spending and trends much more effectively than previous Excel based models.

“Kreg’s PLM program has become an indispensable tool for our Reimbursement Department. We do profitability reports by payer, doctor, product line, with non-financial reports, such as admissions by zip code or cases by doctor. We have become an adjunct Information Systems department. We are moving to EV-PLM and notice that, although PLM calculates reports quickly considering the volume of data it looks at, EV-PLM seems even faster. Both PLM systems are relatively easy to use, but when question and problems arise, the support is excellent.” – Director of Reimbursement, Rhode Island Hospital

"Kreg’s new EV-CMA system is much more efficient and flexible than any other contract management system that we have seen. The contract building features and the relational database make this tool faster and more productive related to fee schedule importing and copying of multiple contract versions to another contract. Similarly, the reporting and claim follow-up features are extremely fast and flexible in the Kreg solution. Kreg has delivered technology that is very user friendly and in our view is state of the art in contract management systems". – John Hailperin – Director of Managed Care, Raritan Bay Medical Center

Our Hospital uses the Kreg Enterprise Vision product to be paperless on many fronts. We use it for all our Hospital policies (and forms) (only 3 hard copy policy manuals kept, now), this was great when preparing for a recent JCAHO survey in that the most recent policies were available to all employees in "real" time, even our Satellite offices. For our 2009 Budget, we went entirely paperless. I used Excel worksheets published from the Kreg G/L & Pay Budgeting systems as well as our own in-house excel files. All were interactive for the managers responses as well as their Supervisors approval. It worked GREAT! All the data was imported into the Kreg products without the usual keying errors that can occur. We publish our daily census and compliance reports as well. Monthly departmental financial reports are all published on EV, with an EV e-mail with a hyperlink right to the location of these reports for ease of access. I smile every time I get to remind staff that, "It's out on EV". - Jeanne Vuksta - Director of Decision Support, Bacharach Institute for Rehabilitation

“CMA is a great tool and information resource. I think its value as a payment variance tool is well known. Equally valuable are the benefits to the Managed Care Contract Negotiation process. Modeling a new proposal against current terms allows for a more accurate estimation the changes have on our contract’s realization. The building of multiple models facilitates counterproposals and exploration of different scenarios to achieve your contracting targets. In recent negotiations an ER case rate was negotiated that at first glance looked fine. In building the model we identified that the charges on many of our ER cases did not exceed the case rate and reimbursement would have been limited to charges. The counterproposal to remove the lesser of provision on ER cases materially impacted net revenue for this contract segment. The Finance department staff also benefits from the reporting capabilities”. – Tom Brady – Revenue Operations Manager, Blue Mountain Health System

With Kreg’s D2D application, when I publish the financial variance reports to the managers and directors it is very nice for them to be able to look at exactly what is in our general ledger system. This feature allows those managers and directors to see the information in an environment that they are familiar with – Excel. They can sort the columns by vendor and many of them are able to answer all of their own questions without having to call the Accounting department. – Ginger Wallen – Budget Manager, Southeast Georgia Health System