HBS International, Inc. (HBSI) is a leader in providing comparative clinical, financial and operational performance information to hospitals and healthcare systems. Until last year, HBSI provided reporting information to its clients in the form of a CD-ROM, typically with a two-week turn-around. Reports typically show data and graphic depictions of data portraying the individual institution's performance against other institutions or aggregate data. Reading the data also required that the customer have a suitable relational database management system (RDBMS) or online analytical processing tool (OLAP). But today, thanks to Visual Numerics, Inc., HBSI harnesses the power of the Internet to provide customers with near real time, customizable visual data analysis online. The newfound ability to gather and analyze data faster and more efficiently has enhanced the way HBSI's customers make critical decisions and manage healthcare delivery.

According to Kathleen Marzahl, vice president of development at Seattle-based HBSI, "At first we came to Visual Numerics looking only for a way to allow customers to create and customize a wide variety of charts and graphs. Then they showed us iDecizion and we realized we could get the charting capabilities plus Web distribution in a single package."

iDecizion is Web-based software that allows the user to quickly access and understand what data means, from anywhere, at anytime. With iDecizion, HBSI customers can rapidly analyze, visualize and share critical information immediately with everyone in the organization, regardless of the computer platform. iDecizion features multiple chart types and visualization techniques for quickly creating 3-D surfaces, X-Y plots, polar plots, animations, contours, bar charts, histograms and more. Once generated, these charts are streamed to the browser for instantaneous analysis and examination. iDecizion's powerful image processing and display routines enable the user to smooth, sharpen, filter and fine-tune images.

Rapid deployment of the system was an imperative for HBSI. Visual Numerics sent two consultants from its Boulder office on April 20, 1999, and they spent a week onsite, then two more weeks working on the project from Boulder.

"They beat the May 30 deadline by several days," Marzahl said. This tiny time-to-market was made possible partly by the expertise in the Visual Numerics consulting group, and partly because iDecizion's architecture lends itself to rapid development. "The ability to read data from varied sources, create a customizable graphic, and distribute that graphic and the associated data securely via the Web is all built into iDecizion," Marzahl added.

iDecizion proved to be a powerful solution in other ways. For example, HBSI's attempt to import data from one OLAP tool proved insufficiently adaptable, which led to an attempt to import data into iDecizion from a second OLAP tool. Both of these attempts proved equally limiting. However, iDecizion's built-in RDBMS import option allowed HBSI to import data directly from the Oracle database that had served as a source for the OLAP tools. "The OLAP tools were extraneous, and unnecessarily restricted data format and volume," Marzahl said. "iDecizion already had the solution inside."

Marzahl sums up the advantages iDecizion offers HBSI's customers. "A typical customer wants, for example, information on the frequency of occurrence of a medical procedure broken out by age range, gender, and time of year. All he has to do is use any Java-enabled Web browser to access HBSI's secure server, get the data in a useful graphic, and customize that graphic in real time. This is real progress."

iDecizion demonstrates again the tremendous untapped potential of the World Wide Web for making knowledge available to those who need it. Partly as a result of Visual Numerics' work with HBSI, a number of other organizations are seeing the Web as a tool for distributing knowledge that can be used to make good decisions right now.