Healthcare Business Insights

The Client: Healthcare Business Insights (HBI) provides best practice research, data and education to more than 1,400 hospitals across the U.S. Its four member-centric academies – focused on revenue cycle, IT, supply chain, and cost and quality – enable healthcare organizations to share best practices, benchmark their data, train staff and improve performance.

The Challenge: HBI delivers its services to members through an online portal accessed through its website. In 2011 it had an outdated portal and many more academies than it does today; it needed to focus its offerings and improve service. The portal had multiple software platforms, which caused problems consolidating data. The platform was not robust; even a small change required days of programmer time. And it wasn’t scalable; it wasn’t able to handle a growing membership. HBI saw the need to make the portal more visually appealing and easier to navigate to find content.

The Solutions: Strategic Systems International (SSI) was brought in to reinvent the portal and consolidate the back-end as a single platform, with new site architecture and consolidated data. From the user perspective, it developed a range of flexible e-learning modules; new charting formats, including heat maps; and more appealing graphics. And it performed all of the back-end work on a rebranded website, working with an outside marketing agency.

The Results: The application, now based on state-of-the-art industry platforms and technology, is much easier to manage and maintain. It is easily expandable, scalable and flexible, so new features are easily added. Users are now able to navigate the portal and export content much more easily and intuitively. From a business perspective, the project has been an unqualified success. More customers are using the portal, and membership has steadily grown. The quality of the portal was the reason HBI was acquired in mid-2015 by Decision Resources Group; SSI played a key role in the process, leading a technical presentation of the application to the buyer.