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Becoming an expert to get HIT!

Feb 28, 2011

Epic Systems has apps!

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Click on the intro photos to view iTunes info page

Haiku
provides authorized clinical users of Epic’s Electronic Health Record with secure access to clinic schedules, hospital patient lists, health summaries, test results and notes. Haiku also supports dictation and In Basket access. Haiku works on both the iPhone and iPod touch.

iPhone Screenshot 1iPhone Screenshot 2 iPhone Screenshot 3


MyChart gives you access to your lab results, appointment information, current medications, immunization history, and more on your mobile device.

iPhone Screenshot 1iPhone Screenshot 2

iPhone Screenshot 3iPhone Screenshot 4


With Ukiah, project team members and system administrators of organizations using Epic Haiku can preview upcoming development before it is released to clinicians.

iPhone Screenshot 1

Feb 26, 2011

Epic Systems Corporation

St. Raphael and Yale hospitals are planning to install EPIC systems.

www.epic.com

91% of HIMSS Stage 7 Hospitals Use EpicCare
-HIMSS Analytics

Inpatient Clinicals

The EpicCare Inpatient Clinical System spans all hospital departments and specialties, giving providers the tools they need to deliver safe, high-quality care. EpicCare's role-based navigators simplify relevant information access for physicians, nurses, therapists, dietitians and any other provider in the hospital setting. Integrated tools include:

  • Wizard-guided Med Rec
  • Collapsible/Expandable Flowsheets
  • Electronic MAR
  • Interdisciplinary Care Plans
  • Hospital Outpatient Support
  • Clinical Pathways
  • ICU Support
  • Barcode Administration via Rover
  • Pharmacy Integration

EpicCare Inpatient shares user-friendly documentation and CPOE features with the rest of Epic's clinical suite, making it easy for users to place orders, minimizing the documentation workload and maintaining a consistent, familiar user interface. At every point in the care process, clinical decision support works to protect patient safety and encourage compliance with organizational best practices.

The integrated design approach translates into a system nurses, physicians and pharmacists embrace. KLAS** noted:

"The typical Epic hospital uses CPOE at a wider and deeper level than other hospitals. Epic has the highest number of hospitals performing closed-loop medication administration, and by a wide margin, the highest per-hospital percentage of physicians that enter notes electronically."


 Inpatient Registration, ADT and Hospital Billing

Enterprise Registration - Inpatient Access
ADT/Prelude Enterprise Inpatient Registration improves bed utilization and gives users the tools to manage hospital stays from pre-admission through discharge. Clinicians can access an efficient census workspace that allows them to view and update current information on patients in their care. Flexible workqueues help nurses and other staff members plan for upcoming ADT events, follow up on missing or inconsistent data and assess utilization.

Enterprise Scheduling
Cadence Enterprise Scheduling makes it easy for users to schedule any type of visit or procedure from anywhere in your organization. It also enhances your ability to keep appropriate slots open, take patient preferences into account and deliver high-quality service that will distinguish your organization.

Cadence serves as an intelligent partner for users, providing context-specific instructions, conflict checking and solutions for complicated appointment searches. Comprehensive rules-based scheduling features accommodate the needs of each clinician, room and piece of equipment – optimizing the use of staff and capital resources throughout your organization.

Hospital Billing
Resolute Hospital Billing coordinates inpatient and outpatient billing for hospitals. It gives your front- and back-office staff the tools they need to streamline billing and collection processes, reduce payor denials and minimize A/R days. Resolute's features support billing staff throughout the hospital, helping you improve your financial performance and encouraging excellent patient service.

Drawing information directly from the EpicCare clinical system, Resolute automatically completes appropriate fields and submits claims in HIPAA-compliant transaction formats. Extensive rules-based claim scrubbing accelerates reimbursement and minimizes rejected claims, even with the most demanding payors. Comprehensive reporting tools help executives track and report on all aspects of financial performance.

Call Management
Customer Relationship Management/Call Management enhances customer service communications by storing patient information, service issues and contact histories in a central location. The system allows users to effectively document, route, monitor and resolve customer service inquiries from patients. The system's integrated reporting tools help you conduct detailed analysis of your organization's customer service, from evaluating individual patient/staff relationships to measuring the overall responsiveness of an entire facility, entity or department.


Integrated Ambulatory EMR

Connecting Affiliates
Epic provides large organizations with structured methods for extending a shared electronic record system to affiliated physician practices and community hospitals. Participating in an Epic shared record solves many of the challenges community providers have with Meaningful Use and interoperability. It does so in a way that's better for patients and less expensive to implement.

You share patients. It makes sense to share their records.
Care quality and continuity are the most obvious benefits of a single shared record, but patients also appreciate the self-service conveniences of MyChart, which can be made available to patients seen in community physician offices. A complete community care record contributes to safer care in the hospital, and conversely, a complete hospital record in the physician's office builds trust and improves follow-up.

Sharing costs less and is less risky.
Depending upon the pricing and subsidy decisions at the host organization, community physicians can have all the benefits of a shared record at a lower cost than implementing a free-standing EHR. They also have the benefit of piggybacking on the technical resources of the host organization, which simplifies hosting, support and upgrades. Small practices can be confident that they are joining a successful implementation and avoid the risks of starting from scratch. Referral workflows are as simple as sending e-mail and require no costly interfaces.

Details for community practices:

  • Makes use of our pre-built Model System to extend the best clinical content, order sets and workflow navigators of our customer community.
  • Shares clinical data freely with appropriate providers, but privately partitions finances and scheduling.
  • Includes turnkey e-learning content for self-guided user training and assessment.
  • After configuration, enables rollout to as many as 2 practice sites per business week.
  • Supports specialists with appropriate order sets and documentation tools.
  • Includes one-time and monthly licensing options for end users.
Details for community hospitals:
  • Takes advantage of a structured build that can be fitted to individual hospitals with minimal configuration... in as little as 48 days.
  • Supports closed-loop medication workflows via Epic's integrated inpatient pharmacy system.
  • Uses, in many cases, the existing external interfaces of the host organization. Adheres to HL7 standards for others.

Feb 24, 2011

Thank you Google

Note: “Dashboards in radiology” is second on Google's search results: Dashboards in radiology

Some of the other individual post hits are from links on Facebook I believe.

I’m going to remove the page split on the search engine post and see if I get any more hits.

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Case/Real-Life Problem-Based Learning with Information System Projects

While teaching courses on computer information systems, in particular Systems Analysis and Design, it is easy to spot students' difficulties in incorporating what they have learned in one course into a different course or project. When subjected to testing how well they mastered the required prerequisites, students are surprised to realize that:

  • Introduction to management information systems has already covered much, if not most, of the basic terminology and concepts needed in subsequent courses on information systems.
  • Economics, accounting, production operations management, quantitative methods, marketing, and finances have provided the necessary business background with regard to how organizations should and do operate. Such a background is indispensable for developing viable business or administrative information systems. Relevant technological issues can be addressed later.
  • Statistics, the basic tool in management science and the theory of information, is also indispensable for any meaningful quantitative analysis of business or administrative entities.

[T]here are several drawbacks with information system group projects within an academic environment, for instance:

  • A student group does not provide an opportunity for a controlled selection of individuals possessing proper professional skills and knowledge to combine them for their synergy. If it happens, it does by chance.
  • Accountability for individual contributions can be thwarted by wrongly understood camaraderie or “false friendship” with the consequence of undermining the learning process for academically weaker individuals.
  • Students must be instructed how to implement a division of labor that does not compromise academic objectives, and how to react effectively from the very beginning to inevitable differences in quality and speed of individual contributions, before these differences endanger the entire project and the cohesion, morale, and performance of the team as a whole.

v2p357-365-128.doc

Why Health Care Information Systems Succeed or Fail

In all, we can identify four main forms of HCIS failure:

• The total failure of a system never implemented or in which a new system is implemented but immediately abandoned. A much-reported example is that of the London Ambulance Service’s new computerised dispatching system. This suffered a catastrophic failure within hours of implementation, leaving paramedics unable to attend health care emergency victims in a timely manner (Health Committee, 1995).

• The partial failure of an initiative in which major goals are unattained or in which there are significant undesirable outcomes. Anderson (1997:87), for instance, cites the case of “An information system installed at the University of Virginia Medical Center [which] was implemented three years behind schedule at a cost that was three times the original estimate.”

• The sustainability failure of an initiative that succeeds initially but then fails after a year or so. Some of the case mix systems installed under the UK National Health Service’s Resource Management Initiative fall into this category. They were made fully operational and achieved some partial use but with limited enthusiasm from staff for using them. Ultimately, they were just switched off (HSMU, 1996).

• The replication failure of an initiative that succeeds in its pilot location but cannot be repeated elsewhere. Although presenters may not realize it at the time, every health informatics conference is jam-packed with replication failures about to happen; The with wonderful innovations that are tested once and then disappear without trace. As an audience, we hear all about the pilot, but we tend not to hear about the replication failure.

Source: Why Health Care Information Systems Succeed or Fail


Central to e-health success and failure is the amount of change between 'where we are now' and 'where the e-health project wants to get us'.

'Where we are now' means the current realities of the situation.  'Where the e-health project wants to get us' means the model or conceptions and assumptions built into the project's design.  eHealth success and failure therefore depends on the size of gap that exists between 'current realities' and 'design of the e-health project'.

The larger this design-reality gap, the greater the risk of e-health failure.  Equally, the smaller the gap, the greater the chance of success.

Analysis of e-health projects indicates that seven dimensions - summarized by the ITPOSMO acronym - are necessary and sufficient to provide an understanding of design-reality gaps:

  • I nformation
  • T echnology
  • P rocesses
  • O bjectives and values
  • S taffing and skills
  • M anagement systems and structures
  • O ther resources: time and money

Putting these dimensions together with the notion of gaps produces the model for understanding success and failure of e-health that is shown below.

Source: http://www.egov4dev.org/health/evaluation/drgmodel.shtml

Feb 17, 2011

Pano System

Found this on a LinkedIn conversation.  The website mentions that this could be used for EMRs.  This is the description below.

http://www.panologic.com/pano-device

The heart of the Pano System is the Pano Zero Client, a whole new class of desktop computing hardware.  Pano endpoints are referred to as "zero clients" because, unlike traditional thin clients, they have no CPU, no memory, no operating system, no drivers, no software and no moving parts.

They simply serve to connect peripheral input-output devices – a keyboard, mouse, VGA display, and audio output – along with other USB peripherals to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop virtual machine running on a hypervisor server in your data center.

Pano Zero Clients not only help you cut the costs of hardware and IT support - they also conserve electricity, using as little as 5% of the energy consumed by even an EnergyStar certified desktop PC.

Connecting using the purpose-built Pano Direct Protocol over standard UDP protocols on your Ethernet LAN, Pano Zero Clients also leverage your DHCP and Directory Services servers, making it easy to integrate them into your existing LAN and security management infrastructure. 

Pano Zero Clients are also stateless – in other words, they do not store anything at all about the user, the desktop virtual machine, or any data used by it. This provides both enhanced data security, since they never contain data that might be lost or stolen, and productivity benefits.   It saves you time shutting down and booting up, and you can immediately resume work with the same set of open applications and files – for example when moving from your office to a conference room to make a presentation or when finishing up work at home in the evening.

The clean and functional design of the Pano was created by Whipsaw, one of the world's leading industrial design firms, helping it fit into modern office and public environments unlike bulky PCs.

Feb 14, 2011

Experiment in search engine exposure

I have posted some common search words found on the internet.  Let’s see if I get more page hits!

Example of a hospital information system

In the textbook Object-Oriented Systems Analysis and Design by Ashrafi details how a hospital information system works.  If you are interested about the future of medical information systems, check out this book!

Textbook on Amazon