Talend prescribes remedial measures for the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital

Bypassing an unreliable information system, the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital improved invoicing by correlating hospital stays data

SURESNES, France - August 18, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration, today announced that the Clermont-Ferrand Hospital in the Auvergne region of France has chosen Talend Open Studio to consolidate data from multiple sources for each of its services to improve invoicing procedures. Previously the hospital used hand-coded scripts which became more and more difficult to manage, particularly since the implementation of the new charge-by-procedure billing system.

Clermont-Ferrand's global information system is characterized by a highly fragmented architecture; each department has an autonomous subsystem connected to a central core common to all the specialties which aggregates the administrative data.

Increasingly complex scripts
“IT Management handles 35 databases-each corresponding to a medical specialty-which are distributed over approximately 25 servers,” explained Dr. Jean-Christophe Jourdy, of the Department of Medical Information. “At the same time the deployment of a new medical product (supplied by McKesson) was underway. We also have an administrative database (a McKesson Hospital Information System) connected to all the servers. Diagnosis and data are captured separately, service by service, and we need to reintegrate this data by combining it in a dedicated database. The aim is to recreate the full path followed by patients in order to bill them correctly and to provide reports to our governing body. Until last year we used many manual processes to consolidate this data, which resulted in multiple scripts.”

In time the management of these scripts became more and more cumbersome: “It not only required mastering a complex and very specific language, but maintaining the scripts was problematic and did not meet the evolving requirements of our activities. Because our financing models have been changing over the past few years, it has become more difficult and time consuming to manually alter the scripts to take new accounting models into account,” added Jean-Christophe Jourdy.

The hospital first tested Talend Open Studio on one or two flows before disseminating it to all databases. The solution was also used to meet loading and extraction needs. It is specifically used to not only check the quality and the consistency of the data between the different systems, but also to locate missing data. Today the old scripts are migrated progressively to Talend Open Studio as new projects are developed and the tool is connected to the hospital's database servers

Cost savings, user-friendliness and increase in productivity
Clermont-Ferrand cited the cost-effectiveness of Talend Open Studio as one of its principal benefits. “Talend Open Studio provides many advantages compared to proprietary tools: on one hand, the solution is completely free as far as licensing is concerned and there's a very low learning curve to get started. We can conserve our IT budget and put the money toward other activities,” explained Jean-Christophe Jourdy. “Its ease-of-use is another major advantage that allows significant productivity savings-we perform tasks more rapidly than before and are able to sort out problems instantaneously and to meet any development request without delay. The solution also let us to take all the data into account and to bill hospital stays which were not previously noted-a significant cost saving.”

”It's clear that open source is an essential tool for the public sector, including hospitals. It allows us to reconcile significant budgetary and technical constraints without sacrificing the performance and the reliability of their IT systems,” concluded Jean-Christophe Jourdy.

About the Clermont-Ferrand teaching hospital

The Clermont-Ferrand teaching hospital has three objectives: treatment, research and teaching. With a capacity of 1,900 beds, the facility employs 6000 people distributed over three sites in the Auvergne Region. The hospital serves a region with more than 1.3 million inhabitants, including the city of Clermont-Ferrand (300,000 inhabitants, 21st largest city in France).

The hospital treats three specific hospitalization areas: short stay, psychiatry, and after-care and rehabilitation. Medicine, surgery, and obstetrics are located in the Gabriel Montpied hospital on the St Jacques plain providing about 800 beds, and the Hôtel-dieu in the city center, built in 1773, and dedicated to gynecology and obstetrics among others. Because the latter site had no room for expansion, all its activities were transferred to the Estaing site, a former industrial site of the Michelin company located between the centers of Clermont-Ferrand and Montferrand. A third building, far from the city center, is primarily dedicated to mid-term care and geriatrics.

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