BPM Partners Ships New Healthcare Industry-Specific Dashboard.

STAMFORD, Conn. -- Independent Authority on Performance Management Helps Jump-Start Performance Management Implementations for Healthcare Clients

BPM Partners, the leading independent authority on business performance management (BPM) solutions, today announced the immediate availability of its first industry-specific performance management dashboard, designed for healthcare organizations. The Healthcare IndEx Pack helps increase the speed by which healthcare institutions can deploy BPM solutions and then reap the resulting return on investment. BPM Partners, working with members of the BPM Implementation Alliance, their global network of performance management implementation experts, intends to deliver industry-specific dashboards for most major industries.

The BPM Partners' Industry Expert (IndEx) Packs provide industry-specific, Web-based, packaged dashboards pre-populated with best practice metrics and measures. The dashboards work with a wide variety of industry standard BPM applications.

"While we'd all like to think our businesses are completely unique, 80 percent of the metrics a company wishes to measure as part of a best practices BPM initiative are the same or similar to those found in like organizations," said Craig Schiff, president and CEO of BPM Partners. "The healthcare industry in particular has dozens of metrics in common.

"In addition, the healthcare industry is being monitored closely as it attempts to cut costs while maintaining high levels of customer care," continued Schiff. "Extensive regulation and a fast changing business environment have combined to create a hot spot of performance management activity."

The Healthcare IndEx Pack allows users to easily combine raw data from multiple sources such as data warehouses, legacy systems and other performance management applications. The BPM Partners Healthcare IndEx Pack includes pre-built charts, graphs and gauges as well as predefined metrics, both cross-industry and industry-specific. In addition, the IndEx pack allows for the addition of organizational specific metrics, addressing the metrics that are not standard across like entities. Specific healthcare measures can range from business-specific information to clinical data. Examples include:

--Total admissions

--Patient satisfaction

--Average number of hours of nursing overtime per week

--Mortality rate

--Unplanned returns to surgery

Performance management experts with specific experience in the healthcare industry point to the workspace environment used to track actions as a powerful feature of the IndEx Pack. "The real power of the Healthcare IndEx Pack is that it allows users at hospitals and other healthcare organizations to do more than simply track metrics and statistics," stated David Zimmer, director of project management at Aster Group, (www.astergroup.com) an information technology consulting firm and one of the BPM Implementation Alliance partners. Zimmer is also a former employee of McKesson Corporation, the leading provider of supply, information and care management products and services designed to reduce costs and improve quality across healthcare.

Zimmer continued, "This dashboard allows users to track actions taken as they relate to higher level goals and initiatives. For example, one of our clients, a major medical center, has an initiative to improve the overall quality of care. With this tool, they can drill down to factors directly related to that program and make notes of actions taken to improve their patient satisfaction, an important factor in care quality."

BPM is a combination of business processes, select measures (metrics, key performance indicators) and systems that enable an organization to understand, act on and influence its business performance. Budgeting, planning, consolidation, scorecards, dashboards, business intelligence (BI) and analytic applications all fall under the BPM umbrella. In addition, regulatory issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, and IFRS compliance are often business drivers for today's BPM applications.

About BPM Partners

BPM Partners is the leading independent authority on business performance management (BPM) solutions and a founding member of the BPM Standards Group. BPM Partners' vendor-neutral consultants guide companies through their BPM initiatives from start to finish, helping companies attain the maximum value from their business performance management initiatives. This is done through hands-on services that provide insight on how to collect and analyze the right information to address specific business goals. BPM Partners leads clients through vendor selection, evaluation and implementation of departmental or enterprise-wide BPM systems.

By analyzing and then matching the client's requirements with the appropriate vendor, BPM Partners helps companies narrow the selection of vendors from a lengthy industry list that includes Applix (Nasdaq: APLX), Cartesis, Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX:CSN), Geac (Nasdaq: GEAC; TSX:GAC), FRx Software, Hyperion (Nasdaq: HYSL), Longview Solutions, OutlookSoft, PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT), SAP (NYSE: SAP), SAS, Satori Group, SRC Software and others. For further details, go to www.bpmpartners.com.