Baptist Health Care wanted to increase agility and collaboration by standardizing audit execution across their different teams. Their main objective was to drive exceptional business performance by aligning audits to strategic imperatives, objectives, and risks.
With MetricStream, Baptist Health Care is able to manage its assurance requirements in a more holistic manner across locations. MetricStream Internal Audit, built on the MetricStream platform and running on Amazon Web Services cloud, automates assurance processes, with the goal of improving the speed and efficiency of decision-making.
The Need for Overhaul
Baptist Health Care strives for health excellence while fulfilling its mission “to help people throughout life’s journey.” The firm operates hospitals, clinics, and a home health agency in northern and western Florida, as well as southern Alabama.
Earlier, the healthcare provider had a siloed and manual approach to manage assurance activities. This made the processes increasingly tedious, especially aggregating data from multiple locations and reporting. Additionally, the inefficiencies of the manual approach, involving spreadsheets and documents, hindered the audit team’s ability to communicate and exchange key risk information with other assurance functions.
Given these challenges, Baptist Health Care was looking for an internal audit solution that would enable it to drive an agile IA program aligned with organizational goals and prepared for multi-dimensional risks, while preserving the trust of every stakeholder. Towards this goal, they chose MetricStream Internal Audit Management, built on the MetricStream Platform and running on MetricStream Cloud, leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS). The product helped implement a more centralized approach to assurance activities, in order to facilitate better coordination and collaboration across locations.
Challenge
- Siloed and manual approach to assurance activities
- Reporting and data aggregation inefficiencies
- Lack of consistent information sharing between teams
- Reliance on outdated tools and technologies, such as spreadsheets
Business Value Realized
- Ability to plan and conduct more efficient, scalable internal audits across locations
- Coordinated assurance activities facilitating fewer gaps in coverage or duplication of effort
- Efficient and accurate management reporting capabilities
- Efficient collation and aggregation of data capabilities
- Import/export of data, data types available, statistics and trend analysis
- Running on AWS Cloud delivers scalability and security
Faster Data Aggregation and Improved Visibility
With the MetricStream product, they can collate and analyze audit data and generate audit reports in a swift and efficient manner. The product delivers a single source of truth, which helps facilitate a more consistent approach to auditing by ensuring that all teams are able to refer to the same set of risk and audit data. It also offers the firm real-time and in-depth visibility into audit processes and the risks associated with each auditable entity based on configuration parameters.
Efficient Issue Identification and Tracking
The implementation has enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of risk management reporting as well as automated issue identification, tracking, and reporting processes. This helped the non-profit’s ability to identify and address any gaps or loopholes.
Risk Based Approach to Audit Planning
MetricStream Internal Audit Management’s risk assessment capability provides IA teams with better flexibility—they can either identify and assess high-risk areas for the audits themselves or use risk assessment data provided by other assurance functions. The IA teams can leverage this data to devise effective audit strategies and provide better-informed recommendations for risk mitigation and remediation.
Enhanced Audit Productivity and Business Performance
With the MetricStream product, the organization has successfully automated processes for audit planning, audit execution, and reporting. The product offers Baptist Health Care the ability to track and conduct internal audits across locations in a more efficient manner. This, together with the alignment of the audit program with strategic goals and objectives, has enhanced the identification of opportunities to accelerate business performance.
