The Data-Warehouse for the health care sector

Unilab-800, developed by Alphasoft, is a Data Warehouse System which provides an integrative and consistent Database for multifaced decision support applications in the different public health establishments.
The necessity of implementing a Decision Support System results due to increasing economy and quality demands in the public health sector. Therefore it becomes more and more important, to perform an in-house controlling as well as an evaluation of economy and productivity. The main difficulty of such a controlling is based on the necessity of extracting and editing relevant information from a plurality of heterogenous data origins. In many cases there are numerous historically grown systems in the public health facilities, which makes an extraction and conflation of information for decision support purposes difficult.

By implementing Unilab-800 it becomes possible to filter relevant information from these not easily understandable data origins and to administrate them in an efficient way. Unilab-800 may be implemented independently of all existing computer systems and enables a subject -oriented, time-varying, non-volatile collection of the data. The data is extracted from the operating systems and after a preparation process it is saved in the Data Warehouse (which is based on Intersystems Cachè Database Management System). Subsequently, the user has the possibility of different views to the data pool, which are enabled by multiple forms of analysis and representation.

By means of Unilab-800 it becomes possible to realize an in-house controlling and evaluation of economy and productivity.

The costs consist of many different components, such as single costs (to be descended from the material purchase) or common costs from the accessed cost center. Therefore Unilab-800 enables opportunities for gathering this information. The relevant data may be gathered manually or automatically imported from various operating systems (e.g. from an inventory control system or a controlling software).

These cost based information may be united with quantities and turnovers from the laboratory information system (or other operating systems) for consolidated analysis purposes. “Traffic light functions” enable an immediate view of problem areas by colouring important classification numbers if they exceed or fall below assigned values.

Unilab-800 enables a range of sender- and analyses oriented calculations to estimate the economy of certain senders.
It is possible to perform multi level profit margin calculations per sender, which makes it feasible to recognize the quantities send in by a sender in a certain period of time and allows the user to get an overview of the generated profits and the caused costs.
In this way achievements can be perceived, which bring apparently high proceeds, but due to their cost intensity only make a small contribution for the maintenance of the ready status and / or the enterprise safety.
Beside the sender and analyses oriented calculations, which were described above, Unilab-800 realizes different forms of cost accounting.
By means of the cost bearer accounting it is possible to detect the costs per unit of achievement (e.g. per payoff cipher) and to compare it with the realisable price. This comparison is the foundation for portfolio analyses and simultaneously a decision support for possible modifications of the performance program.
Finally Unilab-800 enables a Profit Center calculation per Cost Center, which compares the costs accrued on a certain cost center with the turnover on this cost center. At this the costs are differentiated in types of cost (e.g. Personal, Room, Goodwill and Tax). The Profit Center calculation ascertains a profit before the share of overhead costs.