Healthcare

Delivering high-quality care may be the number one priority for healthcare providers, but finding ways to reduce costs has become the number one imperative. The key lies in finding ways to streamline processes, eliminate inefficiency, increase productivity, and improve decision-making.

Expanding the use of information technology (IT) is a smart way to reduce costs and improve access to patient and organizational information. A powerful computing infrastructure helps makes it easier to share the patient information necessary for clinical decisions and access the financial data required to drive business decisions.

Equally important, today's technologies enable physicians, nurses, and administrators to work together as a single integrated team.

Microsoft Dynamics solutions are helping healthcare organizations around the globe improve financial and business processes and deliver more cost-effective healthcare.

Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics solutions for healthcare management
The Microsoft Dynamics technology platform can enable your organization to assemble a complete, integrated set of leading-edge business applications that can be deployed quickly and inexpensively. By using Microsoft Dynamics solutions, your organization can:

• Improve financials and streamline human resources management. Manage financial processes, drill down into summary information, and track non-financial statistical data with ease. Shorten the budget cycle and generate accurate financial forecasts by using powerful budgeting and forecasting tools. Track and analyze vendor information, efficiently process payables, and make the most of vendor discounts while maximizing cash flow.
  
  You can also simplify human resources tasks with tools that are designed to give you greater control and security in managing sensitive payroll information and reducing administrative costs. Attract and retain talented employees by tracking applicant and employee data.
   
• Implement collaborative healthcare. The Microsoft Collaborative Health initiative is helping healthcare organizations address industry challenges by using new technology as a powerful catalyst both to reduce costs and inefficiencies and improve the quality and affordability of healthcare. Built on familiar technology, collaborative health solutions are replacing manual, paper-based transactions with automated processes that streamline information entry and help provide you with seamless access to information from any location.
   
• Manage materials and comply with regulations. Manage an entire supply chain with distributed requisitions management and approval, control over purchasing and vendor management, and comprehensive inventory tracking and control. Ensure that supplies are on hand by using tools for expiration dates, serial and lot management, and multi-bin and multi-location items. Address regulatory compliance initiatives with a framework for storing, categorizing, and searching compliance documents, tracking document modifications, and ensuring that managers have the necessary data and materials to maintain compliance. Together with solutions from industry partners, Microsoft Dynamics addresses a broad range of regulatory requirements and helps provide the tools for implementing intelligent Health Level Seven (HL7) messaging for international standards.

How Microsoft Dynamics GP functions in a healthcare environment

Get the exact functionality you need from people who know your industry

Microsoft Dynamics GP helps you know exactly where you're at, where you're going, and how best to get there-
with tools designed to manage all facets of your operation, from human capital to capital expenditures.

Financial management: Improve efficiency and insight
Microsoft Dynamics GP delivers the financial management tools that healthcare providers need to run their operations with efficiency and business insight. It offers applications that streamline processes, increase productivity, and improve decision-making in areas that are critical for healthcare providers.

• General ledger: The central nervous system for financial processes, the Microsoft Dynamics GP General Ledger module offers strong financial controls and audit trails, the ability to drill down from summary information to the corresponding detail, and unit accounts for tracking non-financial statistical data. It also provides the flexibility to adapt to changing needs along with new process controls to ensure accuracy and consistency.
   
• Financial reporting: FRx, Microsoft's industry-leading financial report writer, uses a spreadsheet-like interface to deliver the ultimate in report design flexibility. Powerful row, column, and reporting tree building blocks make it easy to construct new reports that are customized to answer specific business questions. Reports can be automatically distributed by e-mail, printed, viewed on screen, exported to a Microsoft Office Excel pivot-table report, or published to the Web. FRx also offers exclusive drill-down functionality that enables users to access actual source documents. With Analytical Accounting, financial transactions can also be classified, reported, and analyzed in multilevel reports displayed in Microsoft Office Excel for easy manipulation and integration.
   
• Budgeting and forecasting: The FRx Forecaster module is a Web-based tool for creating and managing budgets and forecasts at any level. With FRx Forecaster, healthcare providers can shorten the budget cycle and generate more accurate financial forecasts. Highlights include automated workflow and planning coordination based on user-defined roles and rules.
   
• Accounts payable: Microsoft Dynamics GP Accounts Payable enables healthcare providers to track and analyze extensive vendor information, efficiently process payables, and make the most of vendor discounts while maximizing cash flow. With Accounts Payable, healthcare administrators have instant access to all vendor history, including checks, invoices, and purchase orders.
   
• Fixed assets: The Fixed Assets module provides features to record, track, and report on capital assets. Highlights include unlimited books to help track assets for corporate, federal tax, alternative minimum tax, adjusted current earnings, and other purposes; total control over asset retirement and transfer; and integration with accounts payable and purchase order processing with full drill-down capability to the original vendor invoice.

Payroll and human resources management: Attract, retain, and manage talented staff
Microsoft Dynamics GP helps healthcare providers attract and retain talented, motivated employees with tools that make it easier to record, store, and access employee information.
Dependent on the skills and experience of physicians, clinicians, nurses, and other professionals, and organized to meet the around-the-clock needs of patients, healthcare providers have extremely complex requirements when it comes to payroll and human resources management. Microsoft Dynamics GP Payroll and Human Resources modules include functionality to coordinate calculation of payroll tasks automatically, even as employees work in different departments and at different rates in a wide range of combinations.

Materials management: The right supplies-where and when they're needed
Microsoft Dynamics GP enables healthcare organizations to improve materials management efficiency so they can deliver the right supplies to the right place at the right time while also lowering costs.

Efficient materials management is an important component for success in virtually every industry. In healthcare, it not only affects the bottom line, it is also key to delivering safe and effective patient care. Microsoft Dynamics GP enables healthcare organizations to ensure that healthcare workers have access to the right supplies when and where they are needed by delivering the framework for efficiently managing the entire chain of supply.

Features to help reduce the cost of healthcare operations
High-quality care is the number one priority for healthcare providers; reducing costs is the number one imperative. Microsoft Dynamics GP can help healthcare organizations streamline processes, increase productivity, and reduce inefficiency. Microsoft Dynamics GP offers a wide range of additional features and capabilities with significant potential to streamline operations and reduce costs. Those features include:

• Microsoft business portal: Microsoft business portal can be a valuable addition to Microsoft Dynamics GP for healthcare providers. Healthcare portal solutions streamline information-sharing by providing a single central location where healthcare organization financial professionals can access important business information. Microsoft business portal also provides an ideal way to deliver human resources information to employees, along with a wide range of self-service employee features. Built on Microsoft SharePoint technologies, the Microsoft Business Portal can be easily integrated with other applications in the enterprise.
   
• Multi-entity capabilities: Today's integrated healthcare delivery systems provide a full range of provider services through hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, and home health agencies. Microsoft Dynamics GP is an extremely cost-effective solution that addresses the problems inherent in standardizing and exchanging financial information between healthcare organizations within an integrated delivery system. Microsoft Dynamics GP also offers the power to provide a single database environment for multi-company healthcare organizations that operate as one.

Regulatory compliance: How Microsoft Dynamics GP can help
Healthcare organizations face a heavy burden in their efforts to achieve compliance with a growing number of regulatory mandates and standards. Microsoft Dynamics GP delivers the enterprise resource planning (ERP) framework healthcare organizations need in order to achieve and maintain compliance with a broad range of regulatory mandates.
Microsoft Dynamics GP provides the tools and ERP framework that can help healthcare organizations connect systems and implement practices and procedures that are the foundation for achieving and maintaining regulatory compliance.

Microsoft Dynamics GP offers modules that can assist healthcare organizations as they work to achieve compliance with critical standards and regulatory requirements:

• Electronic signatures: The electronic signature module helps healthcare organization improve security and enhance data validation by providing the ability to enforce dual signature authorization in addition to the capture of preformatted reason code information and text comments during system transaction activity.
• Audit trails: Audit trails capabilities provide tracking, tracing, and reporting accountability capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics GP. With Audit Trails, healthcare organizations can capture and archive changes to all electronic data and documents required for maintaining regulatory compliance through features including before and after transactional information, user ID, and time and date stamps.

Whether you're managing people, financial issues, materials, costs, or regulatory compliance, Microsoft Dynamics GP gives you highly-customized and focused solutions designed to help maximize healthcare quality and maintain budget parameters at the same time.