St. Catherine Hospital Solves Budgeting and Reporting Challenges with IDEA Budget Solution

St. Catherine Hospital is a sole community provider located in Garden City, Kansas.  As the primary healthcare facility in this rural area, St. Catherine is dedicated to excellence in the community.  In fact, the hospital was recently recognized at the National Conference of Healthstream Research for most improved physician satisfaction. 

As CFO of St. Catherine Hospital, Amanda Vaughan realized that the hospital’s budgeting and reporting process was in need of improvement and modernization.  Amanda found IDEA Budget Solution ® and contacted the IDEA Consulting Group team to get a demonstration of the product.  Amanda and her finance team were very impressed with the demo of the product and were eager to get started with the implementation.

CHALLENGE:  To improve the budgeting and reporting processes, making the whole process faster, easier, and more efficient for everyone involved.

• Prior to implementing IDEA Budget Solution ®, St. Catherine’s budgeting and reporting process included a great deal of time and effort spent on printing and distributing paper copies to hospital management. 
• St. Catherine also spent many dollars on consultants to help maintain an out of date system that just wasn’t meeting their needs. 
• The hospital also knew that their corporate healthcare system was going to be converting to a new general ledger system within the next year. 
• The new budgeting and reporting solution would need to be implemented quickly.
• The new system would need the ability to work seamlessly with the current general ledger system, but it would also need to be converted easily to the new general ledger system coming in the near future.

SOLUTION:  St. Catherine Hospital chose IDEA Budget Solution ® to meet its budgeting and reporting needs.

• After viewing the product demonstration, Amanda Vaughan and her finance team found IDEA Budget Solution ® to be user friendly as well as cost effective. 
• The implementation time for this product was very quick, and the product would be extremely easy to maintain.
• IDEA Budget Solution ® would easily be able to accommodate the chart of accounts change that would come with a new general ledger system.
• The budgeting and reporting system would now be totally paperless.  Distribution of budget worksheets and reports would now be a completely automated process. 
• Changes to budget worksheets could quickly and easily be aggregated back into the IDEA Budget Solution database as often as necessary.

“After viewing the demo online, we were very impressed with this product because it was so user friendly.  We chose IDEA Budget Solution ® because the product would be easy for our managers to use and the cost was not prohibitive.”

Sharis Bange, Financial Analyst, St. Catherine Hospital

DELIVERING THE SOLUTION:  The software implementation went quickly
and smoothly.

• The software was loaded easily via the Internet and tested via web conferencing before the onsite visit.
• The IDEA Consulting Group team came onsite to train the Finance Department staff.
• The product templates had the ability to be customized by IDEA Consulting Group to meet all of St. Catherine Hospital’s specific needs.

“The training was very thorough.  The trainers were very knowledgeable; they had answers for everything.  The customer support and response time has always been excellent as well, especially compared with other vendors that we have used.”

Sharis Bange, Financial Analyst, St. Catherine Hospital

RESULTS:  The implementation of IDEA Budget Solution ® was a success for St. Catherine Hospital.

• The department managers at St. Catherine Hospital like the easy budgeting worksheets and the ability to make changes and then re-aggregate the budgets in the IDEA Budget Solution database as frequently as senior management chooses.
• In addition, managers are now getting reports on a monthly basis.  This process is now completely automated with no need to print and distribute paper copies. 
• The managers like the ability to see any prior month’s data in the current monthly report at the click of the mouse.

“When I look back on the amount of time the Finance Department used to spend on budgeting and reporting for the hospital, I realize that we have probably shaved a couple
of weeks off the budget timeline just by automating the process with IDEA Budget Solution ®.”

Sharis Bange, Financial Analyst, St. Catherine Hospital

SPOTLIGHT ON ST. CATHERINE HOSPITAL:  St. Catherine Hospital is a 99 bed hospital located in Garden City, Kansas.  The hospital has approximately 133 cost centers and 625 employees.  The hospital recently opened a new Wound Care Center as well as a new Labor and Delivery wing. St. Catherine Hospital is accredited by the Joint Commission.