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In recent years, as China's macroeconomic structure continuously adjusts, a series of documents have been issued since 2009 requiring public hospitals to "strictly manage budgets and strengthen budget constraints." The reform of the medical and health system faces ongoing deepening. A certain central hospital, as a comprehensive institution integrating medical treatment, teaching, research, and prevention, has consistently kept pace with policy requirements and development trends in the healthcare industry. Aiming to establish an all-round, whole-process, full-coverage budget performance management system, it seeks to enhance hospital management levels through modern management methods and new technology applications.
▌ Project Objectives
This central hospital highly values the continuous optimization of its comprehensive budget management system through modern management methods and new technology applications. Even before this project began, the hospital possessed a certain foundation in budget management. However, as budget management was confined to the finance department and lacked support from informatization tools, the budget management work faced the following challenges:
● Budget compilation relied on traditional manual, offline methods. The budget submission period was long, and the workload was heavy. More efficient budget collaboration management tools were needed to improve budget compilation efficiency.
● Although the hospital had established a relatively standardized comprehensive budget management system, budget compilation was essentially still completed by the Finance Department. Clinical departments, medical technology departments, and other functional departments had low participation. Budget compilation information was not comprehensive enough. A more efficient budget management system was needed to break down data barriers between departments and increase overall staff participation.
● The hospital's budget management approach was primarily static. To meet relevant policy and system requirements, and to address the needs of healthcare reform and the transformation of the hospital's development model, an upgrade to a more complete comprehensive budget management informatization system was urgently needed. This would strengthen the budget's constraining role, enhance service quality and operational efficiency in the face of healthcare reform and fierce market competition, and achieve dynamic and refined management.
● The hospital lacked budget execution control and monitoring tools, relying mainly on post-event control without in-process control. Effective early warning and feedback mechanisms were not established. A budget management system was needed to achieve a comprehensive budget management system based on business-finance integration. This would involve setting budget goals based on strategic plans pre-event, controlling expenditures based on available budget amounts in-process with timely warnings and reminders, and conducting multi-dimensional comparative analysis post-event to scientifically and efficiently manage various fund expenditures in hospital operations, achieving increasing revenue and reducing costs.
● Comprehensive budget management was not closely integrated with the hospital's strategic goals. A professional consulting implementation team was needed to systematically sort out the hospital's budget management system, improve budget management processes, use the hospital's strategic plans and annual operational plans as the basis for comprehensive budget management, and decompose strategic goals into specific indicator systems and appraisal standards to achieve rational allocation and efficient utilization of hospital resources.
▌ Project Construction Approach
To more effectively solve the aforementioned management challenges, the hospital introduced an external consulting implementation team to initiate the hospital comprehensive budget management project. After consultation and communication with the implementation team, it was confirmed that the project's construction approach would primarily focus on two aspects:
Firstly, based on the hospital's financial transformation needs, further improve the organizational structure and system framework of comprehensive budget management on the basis of existing budget work. Clarify budget management objectives, implement responsible department management, comprehensively map out various business processes involved in budget management, and build an all-round, whole-process, full-coverage comprehensive budget management system.
Secondly, adopt a high-performance comprehensive budget management system to achieve closed-loop management of the entire process including hospital budget compilation, approval, execution, adjustment, analysis, and appraisal. This ensures the budget plan is effectively implemented, making the hospital's comprehensive budget management comprehensive, scientific, refined, and flexible.
▌ Project Construction Results
Based on the hospital's management status and project requirements, the relevant hospital project responsible persons jointly established a comprehensive budget system project team with Intcube. The early project phase focused on requirement investigation and solution design. Through the collection and study of relevant materials and interviews with key users, the project's goals and scope were clarified, the comprehensive budget management system was structured, and the system business solution was designed. After the solution was completed, deployment and implementation proceeded according to the business solution. Through key user testing and user training, user feedback was collected promptly for improvements, achieving 100% completion of the overall project objectives.
Through the construction and implementation of the Intcube Hospital Comprehensive Budget Management System, the hospital closely centered around its strategic goals and established a comprehensive budget management closed-loop guided by strategy, based on business, and resulting in finance. Work processes were optimized, a new management model was pioneered, and it strongly promoted the digital transformation of hospital budget compilation, budget approval and issuance, budget execution and feedback monitoring, and budget adjustment. This made budget management a true daily management focus for the hospital, gradually achieving refined management, transforming hospital budget management from extensive to comprehensive, and strengthening the hospital's budget control, analysis, and decision-making capabilities.
Centering on Strategic Goals for Unified Management
Previously, due to the lack of support from an informatized management system, the client hospital struggled to achieve business-finance integration, making some comprehensive budget work difficult to implement. During this project's deployment, the project team built a strategy-oriented comprehensive budget management system. Budget compilation, adjustment, execution, analysis, actual data import, etc., were all incorporated into the budget system, covering multiple business application scenarios such as organization, account, year, period, scenario, project, and comprehensive. This achieved unified management on a single platform. Hospital budget management work, led by the Finance Department, is now uniformly conducted by all hospital departments and units through the Intcube Comprehensive Budget Management System, responsible for their corresponding budget tasks. This eliminated the data gap between the hospital's various business departments and units, greatly increased participation in budget management work across different hospital departments, and ensured the comprehensiveness and accuracy of budget data.
Collaborative Budget Compilation Improves Work Efficiency and Accuracy
Budget compilation is the foundational step of budget management. Intcube Planning provides functional modules including budget compilation processes, budget report design, annual budget adjustment, and budget execution progress tracking. Relevant budget responsible persons can operate according to their permissions. Budget entry data is uploaded in real time, and data is interconnected between various businesses. This liberated the hospital from the heavy work of manual budget compilation, improved budget compilation efficiency and data accuracy, and allowed the hospital to devote more energy to budget execution control and analysis.
Strengthened Budget Control Enhances Management Efficacy
According to project requirements, the Intcube Comprehensive Budget Management System was used to achieve execution control over budget version data. The system supports built-in customizable control strategies and budget standards. Business documents, processes, and user permissions are deployed and configured according to client management needs. Business data, budget data, and financial data are managed efficiently and uniformly, eliminating information disparity between departments. This helps the hospital predict the occurrence and development of budgets in advance, query and monitor the specific situation of budget execution in real time, achieving pre-event prediction, in-process control, early intervention in budgets and operations, and timely budget adjustments.
Multi-Dimensional Data Model Enables Dynamic Data Visualization
The implementation of the comprehensive budget system upgraded the client hospital from static to dynamic management. The Intcube EPM used in the project is developed based on a domestically pioneered multi-dimensional database platform. It breaks the data management model of traditional relational databases, emphasizes the use of flexible and fast data linkage methods throughout the entire process, and uses the simplest drag-and-drop methods to design adapted functions. This enables rapid linkage and calculation of complex data, facilitates real-time dynamic data management and querying for users, and supports visualization design for presentation, allowing managers to understand key hospital operational data at a glance.
With the successful implementation of the project, the hospital, through Intcube EPM, has successively completed the construction of functional modules such as organizational structure setup, budget compilation, budget approval, report analysis, and budget data execution control. This project solution is not limited to historical financial data; it fully meets the hospital's business-finance integration plans. It controls budgets and allocates resources based on the occurrence and development of hospital services, covering the entire process of hospital operations with budget management, achieving full-process coverage, and making budget plans more accurate and forward-looking.
The healthcare industry is currently facing a digital revolution. Intcube has successfully served numerous domestic medical institutions, pharmaceutical production enterprises, and pharmaceutical operating enterprises. Its product application scenarios cover all areas of the healthcare industry, with rich project service and implementation experience. In the future, Intcube looks forward to partnering with numerous healthcare industry clients on the new journey of digital transformation.
