Centre Hospitalier de Niort maps its medical activities

Click here for a French version.

The Centre Hospitalier de Niort in the French department of Les Deux-Sèvres has an annual budget of €173 million ($235.6 million). This budget is reviewed annually by its coordinating body, the ARH (Agence Régionale d’Hospitalisation – Regional Hospitals Agency), a private/public interest group representing the French state and health insurers.

The ARH is responsible for implementing the central government’s hospital policy at the regional level – analyzing and coordinating the activities of public and private sector healthcare facilities. It does this by working with them to agree upon target-based multi-year contracts and to identify the resources required. For this purpose, the ARH relies primarily on the comprehensive, high-quality data that hospital doctors and their teams provide to the DIM (Département d’Information Médicale – Medical Records Department).

The DIM gathers and processes the hospital’s medical information and implements in individual hospital departments the medical information system reforms introduced by three regulatory authorities: the ARH, the Directorate for Hospitalisation and Organization of Care and the National Health Authority. This is the reason why data gathering, processing and analysis are of such crucial importance for the hospital.

Major issues

“The data we use impact a number of major issues, such as staff development and bed closure decisions,” explains Delphine Yzèbe, one of the doctors working in the Niort DIM. “We also supply the hospital management team and medical staff with all the medical statistics they need to deliver care effectively.” IBM® SPSS® Statistics also manages data on the numbers of medical treatments, consultations, in-patient stays, illnesses and patients managed by the hospital.

These data are then cross-referenced by incorporating time parameters to measure annual medical activity levels and trends. Armed with this mapping capability, the hospital center now intends to go further. “Using IBM® SPSS® Modeler, the IBM SPSS data mining workbench, we now plan to forecast the medical activity levels of selected hospital departments over the period 2008 to 2012,” continues Dr.Yzèbe. “It’ll take me about a week of preparation before I can present it to the management team.”

Loyal to IBM SPSS Statistics

IBM SPSS Statistics makes a crucial contribution to the work done by Dr. Yzèbe. “I’ve stayed loyal to IBM SPSS Statistics because it’s so simple to use,” she adds. “The solution is intuitive and requires no programming. You can be up and running immediately without losing your way. I’m also very happy with its computing power and the degree of detail in the results it gives us. We also value the high level of attentiveness we get from the technical support team, whose members are readily accessible. One of my aims now is to train other people in how to use IBM SPSS Statistics and IBM SPSS Modeler.”

About IBM Business Analytics
IBM Business Analytics software delivers complete, consistent and accurate information that decision-makers trust to improve business performance. A comprehensive portfolio of business intelligence, predictive analytics, financial performance and strategy management, and analytic applications provides clear, immediate and actionable insights into current performance and the ability to predict future outcomes.

Combined with rich industry solutions, proven practices and professional services, organisations of every size can drive the highest productivity, confidently automate decisions and deliver better results.