Managing Day-to-Day Capital Spending at
St. Rita’s Medical Center

CLIENT

St. Rita’s Medical Center provides comprehensive healthcare services to a ten-county region in West Central Ohio. This region is one of nine served by St. Rita’s parent organization, Catholic Healthcare Partners, one of the largest not-for-profit health systems in the U.S. St. Rita’s includes an acute care hospital, three treatment facilities and an occupational health center, and has a total of 429 beds.

CHALLENGE

For many years, St. Rita’s employed a budgeting process that used paper submissions. With the variety of stakeholders responsible for identifying capital needs, including clinical management, biomedical engineering and the facilities department, this process made it difficult to effectively track the status of submissions, and paperwork was sometimes lost. Handwritten records used to track capital expenditures made the process of compiling reports or reconciling expenses time consuming and labor intensive.

As St. Rita’s entered the design stage of a major building project, the organization sought a better solution for capturing capital cost information that would provide:

• Timely capital spending information to track project expenses
• Executive-level views into current spending levels and cash flow needs
• Ability to track the status of capital requests and house capital need information in a single location.

SOLUTION

St. Rita’s selected VFA.spendManager™ as its capital spend management system because it enables everyone involved in capital management to see the current status of capital requisitions and expenditures, and provided a central repository for all the information related to a particular capital need. Through integration with other enterprise systems that are synchronized every two hours, St. Rita’s can capture relevant data about capital items from across the organization. Managers no longer need to manually reconcile requisitions with purchase orders and invoices, but have current information at their fingertips.

RESULTS

VFA.spendManager has enabled St. Rita’s to streamline the approval process for capital requests. Managers have “anytime, anywhere” access to capital project information. Data from purchase orders and invoices is always accurate. The capital dashboard gives executives a high-level view of fiscal year spending and the ability to drill down into the details on an individual capital need. Customized reports enable executives to visualize spending requirements over several years.