TelQuest Gives
Healthcare Organizations
User-Friendly Reporting Solution
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OfficeWriter for Java is Backbone of
High-powered
Excel Application
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Company Profile
Founded in 1996, TelQuest International is a software and
information technology solutions provider focused on innovative
ways to make healthcare organizations more profitable, efficient
and effective.
 TelQuest
works closely with both large integrated delivery networks
and single facility healthcare organizations to improve their
operational efficiency and bottom-line performance. Their product,
MedPay, is the first enterprise payment solution developed
specifically for the healthcare industry.
Situation
TelQuest needed to provide their MedPay customers within healthcare
organizations a flexible reporting tool that tied in with the
accounting systems of hospital patient, physician office and
health plans. It was important to TelQuest to use a familiar
format like Excel to provide a full range of predefined reports
as well as the ability to create and save customized reports.
The end users of the MedPay system are often not technically
savvy so it was crucial to reduce the learning curve on the
reporting tool as much as possible. They wanted to eliminate
the need for their clients' staff to know any new software,
write SQL queries or manipulate databases to find the information
they needed.
And because their clients are located in multiple locations
and not always in touch with TelQuest, they couldn't use proprietary
tools that required that software be installed on each client's
machine.
Finally cost was a factor. Since it was just one piece of
the MedPay solution, TelQuest was hesitant about investing
significant amounts of money into a complex reporting solution.
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Solution
TelQuest turned to SoftArtisans' Java version of OfficeWriter
and built an entire custom reporting module around it.
MedPay creates the necessary SQL on the fly and uses
OfficeWriter to generate the resulting report.
With OfficeWriter as the backbone of MedPay's Reporting
Module, hundreds of clients can run daily activity reports,
filter datasets, create and save their own customized
reports and run/rerun reports at anytime. Several thousand
transactions, some with as many as 80 distinct parameters,
are generated each month.
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Benefits
Familiar Excel Features
MedPay's patient payment solution generates a lot of data,
making it difficult to provide for every user's reporting
needs using only pre-defined reports. By providing the reports
in real Excel, end users are more comfortable and productive
when reviewing and analyzing the reports.
"We decided that the best solution would be to use OfficeWriter
to dump data to the user’s PC in Excel format so that users
could then slice and dice the data to their heart's content," said
TelQuest President David Huie. "Other reporting solutions may offer the ability to create
reports and then export them to Excel, but only OfficeWriter
provides the one-click solution for generating Excel reports
that our clients love."
No Additional Training Needed
"Our primary goal was to allow our end users who typically do
not know SQL to create their own reports with a simple point-and-click
interface," explained Huie. "Many IT vendors boast that their
systems support report-writing solutions such as Crystal Reports.
We could have gone that route as well, but then our clients would
have had to go out and hire someone to write the SQL queries
and figure out our database schema to make those reports work.
"With our OfficeWriter solution, any user who knows how to operate
a mouse can generate complex reports on his or her own."
Web-friendly Licensing
Because OfficeWriter is licensed on a per-server basis, TelQuest
was able to avoid paying for high cost report-writers like
Crystal Reports and Actuate that are licensed on a per-user
model.
"We are selling in a market – the hospital industry – where
margins are tight," said Huie. "We, therefore, have to price
our MedPay product so that the ROI is extremely compelling.
We looked at open source reporting solutions, but using them
to develop the highly flexible reporting system we have today
would have been very costly. We then looked at products such
as Crystal and Actuate but were shocked at the high price of
these solutions. Fortunately we came across OfficeWriter which
provided all the functionality we need and at a very reasonable
price."
Screenshots
Figure 1: Request Daily Activity Report
Figure
2: Daily Activity Report
Figure
3: Transaction Report Drill-Down
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