SAS^® Financial Intelligence for Healthcare

Managing financial information is often a daunting challenge to financial officers and other healthcare leaders who must demonstrate accountability and return on investment. In many organizations, financial, clinical and operational data are housed in disparate systems, making it difficult or impossible to combine and share that information. Data that is stored manually in spreadsheets or databases increases the likelihood of inaccuracies creeping into the financial reports provided to organizational leadership, auditors and the public.

In the Spotlight Analyst Viewpoints Read what analysts are saying about Financial Intelligence from SAS

At for-profit and nonprofit organizations alike, creating budget data or accounting for such assets as property, equipment and materials involve labor-intensive processes that can make even the simplest of questions seem impossible to answer.

What if you could turn financial information into financial intelligence?
SAS Financial Management is one component of SAS Financial Intelligence, a vision for financial performance management that includes solutions for financial management, activity-based management, dashboards and scorecarding and advanced analytics such as optimization and forecasting. By combining the hindsight, insight and foresight that these powerful solutions provide, finance departments can build credibility through the accurate information they deliver and gain the confidence of other departments.

SAS Financial Management
With SAS Financial Management, healthcare financial leaders can collate financial information from a variety of systems across their organization, yielding timely and comprehensive results. Our solution facilitates regulatory compliance by integrating data management and financial intelligence with the finest online analytic processing in the industry. It allows you to view your institution from any perspective: facility, line-of-business, departmental or others.
SAS Financial Management includes two integrated functional components:

• Planning – allows finance executives and other relevant finance department personnel to embed advanced SAS analytics into budgets and plans to forecast future operating results more accurately.
• Financial reporting – consolidates multidimensional information on demand while performing all financial calculations relevant to the reporting and planning processes, thereby enabling organizations to close their books more rapidly.

Benefits of financial management
With SAS Financial Management, financial officers and other healthcare leaders will benefit from:

• Timely and accurate forecasts – Develop accurate plans and forecasts that can be updated easily in response to changing business and operational circumstances.
• Greater financial transparency – Create a more transparent environment for managing financial and operational data to produce timely, accurate and relevant reports. This transparency is achieved by extending control of information horizontally across the institution and vertically between transaction-oriented systems and the higher-level financial management system.
• Rapid report publishing – Reduce the time required to produce and publish financial reports. On-demand consolidations, which simultaneously incorporate any necessary currency conversions, eliminations, ownership adjustments and allocations, can reduce the time and cost of financial consolidations.
• The integrity of financial information – Maintain data integrity and security through the financial data mart that protects the data that supports intelligent decisions. Consolidate financial data from diverse sources systematically to avoid manual—thus error-prone—transcription.
• Financial performance management – Integrate performance management systems, such as scorecarding, financial consolidation, analysis and reporting, and budgeting.

SAS Activity-Based Management
SAS Activity-Based Management is the market-leading solution that gives healthcare leaders the level of detail necessary to make accurate, insightful decisions that will improve financial performance. Unlike traditional accounting systems that are geared for external reporting, SAS Activity-Based Management provides accurate financial information in a form that mirrors the day-to-day activities of the people, equipment and processes that directly affect an institution’s bottom line.

Benefits of activity-based management
With SAS Activity-Based Management, you can:

• Determine the true contributors to – and detractors from – optimum financial performance.
• Accurately predict costs and resource requirements associated with changes in organizational structure and resource costs.
• Easily identify the root causes of poor financial performance.
• Track costs of activities and work processes.
• Give shared-service organizations, such as the IT department, a clear understanding of costs associated with internal customers, so budgets and service-level agreements can be more accurately determined.
• Equip healthcare leaders with cost intelligence to drive improvements.