ATLANTA – Jay Deady says today’s hospitals don’t need to add beds to meet patient demands – they just need to better manage what they have.

Deady, executive vice president of client solutions for Eclipsys, says the Atlanta-based provider of healthcare IT products has added that important piece to the puzzle with the acquisition of the Premise Corp., a Farmington, Conn.-based developer of patient flow solutions. The deal, he says, allows Eclipsys to add bed management, bed turnover and patient transport tools to its Sunrise suite of software.

The key, says Deady, is providing hospitals with information they can use immediately.

“Data-mining is great for helping patients in the future. The challenge is it’s not going to be helping the patients who are in the beds today,” he said. “You want to be able to take information from underlying solutions and deliver results in real time.”

According to a recent HIMSS Analytics study, 61 percent of the nation’s hospitals don’t have a bed management system in place, and yet the ROI is there. The Advisory Board Company, a research and analysis firm, has estimated that an average, 300-bed hospital that reduces the overall length of stay by one day can reduce nursing costs by $1 million to $2 million a year – the equivalent of adding 49 beds. In addition, the company said, the revenues generated by reducing the overall length of stay – through better use of the hospital’s resources – amount to $1.2 million a year.

The Yale New Haven Health System in Connecticut is a client of both Eclipsys and Premise. Deady said using Premise’s patient flow solutions helped the health system realize a savings equivalent to adding 30 to 50 beds.

“The Premise solution has helped us manage our demand,” said Mark L. Anderson, senior vice president of information systems for YNHHS. “Since 2000, we’ve seen a 20 percent increase in annual discharge volume.”

The Premise acquisition caps off a busy year for Eclipsys, which acquired Enterprise Performance Systems, Inc. (EPSi) of St. Louis last February and MediNotes of Des Moines, Iowa, in October. Deady says both acquisitions have boosted the company’s bottom line and provided Eclipsys with a stronger portfolio of IT solutions for healthcare providers looking for hard ROI in challenging economic times.

“The acquisition of Premise, together with our acquisition of EPSi last spring and the availability of our Sunrise Clinical Analytics, helps build out a world-class solution set that supports direct patient care-related activities as well as operational performance management,” said R. Andrew Eckert, Eclipsys’ president and CEO.