[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Life Care Centers of America has deployed a Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) solution in more than 200 skilled nursing facilities nationwide. In the process of BI deployment, Life Care has experienced a noticeable difference in its operations by providing accurate and timely data, says Microsoft.

For most of its 40 years, Life Care operated in a decentralized fashion. Fast growth and geographically dispersed locations made this the ideal organizational structure at the time. As the company grew, however, the company realized the need to have consistent, accurate and timely data for in-depth analysis and better decision-making. It soon became clear that the company needed a centralized BI system to fuel continued growth.

“Ultimately, it’s all about the care of our residents and, in our previous setup, data was only delivered fast enough for us to make reactive decisions,” said Mark Gooch, director of BI at Life Care.

Based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft BI offered a new yet familiar environment for Life Care’s existing IT staff. Managers and executives were also familiar with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which provided the portal technology for its operational dashboards.

The solution went live in 2010 and is now automatically fed by data from financial, clinical and human resource systems. Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services imports, transforms and loads the data into a SQL-based enterprise data warehouse, which is then used to create OLAP cubes for advanced data analytics.

Because of the automated nature of Microsoft BI, Life Care has reduced its IT support costs by 90 percent compared with its previous performance improvement system.

Upload: 03-11-12