SWANSEA, IL – Physicians at the Cancer Treatment Center of Southern Illinois are bringing order to large amounts of data and putting it to work to provide better care and save the center money.

Having already converted all of their paper charts to digital ones, the center's administrators and doctors knew they had plenty of data to tap into, yet they lacked the information they needed to make critical decisions about how best to manage the center.

They turned to visualization software to help them look at the data in a graphical format so they could better analyze it and, in turn, improve care, understand reimbursement and get a better handle on skyrocketing drug costs.

Jeff Skjerseth, administrator of the cancer center, says MedAdvizor is one of the most powerful management tools he's ever used.

Advizor Solutions, based in Downers Grove, Ill., developed the technology, which it promotes in several vertical markets. Its customers include Motorola, Boeing and Credit Suisse.

Other vendors in this sector include IBM, BusinessObjects, Microsoft, Cognos, Hyperion, Oracle and SAS and Advanced Visual Systems.

Demand for data visualization software is growing as the technology becomes more powerful and easier to use, says David Adams, a senior manager with Accenture.

"Sophisticated statistical and data-mining techniques incorporated under the covers are allowing visualizations to support smarter analytics," Adams writes in a recent white paper.

Mike Cogswell, president of MedAdvizor, sees the technology as business intelligence software. "It was created to help people make decisions," he said.

There are lots of decisions to be made at the Cancer Treatment Center, Skjerseth said. The center, with four remote oncology sites and 65 employees, sees about 100 patients a day, and it uses a broad range of technology in its work.

What most medical practices do is run reports at the end of the month, Skjerseth said. "They take out the pieces of information and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. Then they create graphs. For me, it was a weeklong adventure."

MedAdvizor takes data directly from the database and produces graphs in real time.

"I can look at any aspect of data for all physicians, without having to create a secondary database to get at the information," Skjerseth said.

The pricing model for MedAdvizor is based on the number of users – from $45,000 for a small physician practice and as much as $250,000 for larger networks.

Return on investment comes in time saved cultivating mounds of data and also in better decision-making. What used to take Skjerseth a week each month is accomplished instantly. "It's going to revolutionize medical reporting," Skjerseth said. "Reporting is going out the window. Everybody's going to become an analyst."