Microsoft Great Plains fits multiple services market niche and healthcare is not exemption. In the case of Healthcare/Hospital there is usually healthcare patient history tracking system in place and backoffice or accounting application should be integrated on the ongoing basis with the above mentioned system plus often Hospital or association is non-profit organization and non-for-profit accounting specifics should be taken into consideration.

• Integration. Great Plains is MS SQL Server based application and SQL scripting/stored procedures is the choice for ongoing integration. The second option is Great Plains Integration Manager – it is end-user tool and it should be considered if the integration volume is low or moderate (up to thousand transactions per day). Usually you do integrate customer billing records and do billing from Great Plains. Great Plains advanced reporting functionality will allow you to control your cost and expenses.

• Financial Reporting. FRx is the tool of choice in the case of Microsoft Great Plains. Being healthcare organization you can consolidate multiple companies (hospitals or clinics) and have all standard and advanced financial reports: Income Statement, Cash Flow, Balance Sheet. Reporting tree utilization in FRx allows you to select business units and do performance comparison

• Compliance Reporting. Microsoft Great Plains, being SQL application allows you to deploy such tools as Crystal Reports to create healthcare-specific reports for your clients, contractors, state and federal regulation authorities. In Crystal Reports you can create report with the data from Microsoft Great Plains and Patient tracking system., even if the last one if not SQL Server based. Crystal Report can work with heterogeneous queries and stored procedures

• Patient Invoices Lookup. If patient calls you and questions the bill – you should have quick lookup from your CRM to Great Plains invoices for this customer. Some Hospitals offer internet bills lookup for their clients. This might become required feature in the following three or five years. You can implement this web-lookups via web publishing from Microsoft Great Plains database.

We encourage you to analyze your alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan

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