MedStar Health implemented newly released PeopleSoft Grants features

MedStar Health is a not-for-profit healthcare organization. It operates more than 120 entities, including ten hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area of the United States.

Recently, MedStar Health, in conjunction with their partner SpearMC, implemented newly released PeopleSoft Grants features as well as expanded and enhanced their principal investigator reporting using BI Publisher.

Some of the enhancements implemented include:

• Hold billing on unpaid costs: MedStar turned on the new feature for “Hold Billing on Unpaid Costs,” which prevents unpaid vouchers or unpaid expense reports charged to as-incurred grants from being sent to billing. This functionality satisfies a requirement for certain sponsors who specify vouchers or expenses must be paid before the sponsor is invoiced. This feature eliminates the need for either a customization or manual effort to find and select unpaid rows to be deferred on a billing worksheet.
• Use of project ChartFields: MedStar turned on the new feature for “Use Project ChartFields.” This feature allows the project costing business unit and activity ID to be specified on the contract so that accounting entries for billing, revenue, and pre-paid amounts can include these fields. This feature not only allows for more detail but also for consistency in accounting and reporting. MedStar also expanded their use of products, which makes contract setup easier by bringing in more defaults for how a grant should be billed and revenue recognized.
• Proposal and award setup: The delivered Contract WorkBench was rolled out to allow viewing grant setup on a single page.
• BI Publisher: Based on MedStar Health’s requirements, SpearMC developed a new principal investigator report. Using the BI Publisher, multiple reports are generated and distributed at various summary and detail levels in both Excel and PDF versions that help to accurately report on and track grants project financials. After rolling out the report, MedStar received glowing feedback from the research community.