Realize More Value from Hospital Information Systems

A hospital relies on its hospital information system (HIS) as the technology foundation for the facility, and for good reason. Years of investment have gone into the implementation of these systems, and the HIS is a dependable way to process the thousands of financial and clinical data transactions that take place daily in a hospital.

Unfortunately, along with the strengths of a hospital information system come certain weaknesses, typically related to physician usability. Physicians often find HIS of record difficult to navigate making it hard to access to patient information quickly. And hospitals often have many departmental applications that create additional complexity for physicians. A typical complaint from physicians is the need to log into multiple systems on a regular basis to gather patient information or sign patient charts, which is perceived as an administrative hassle. The proprietary nature of many HIS makes data integration extremely difficult. Physicians are forced to separately access information from ancillary systems, a fragmented and time-consuming way to gain a full clinical picture of a patient. As a result, physicians often eschew using the HIS, and depend on nurses to extract and print out its data. This takes valuable time away from nurses’ interactions with patients, while affecting their productivity. The results are a low physician adoption rates, and a perception among physicians that the hospital is not keeping a technology pace with its competitors.

Most hospitals are vested in the continued success of their HIS investment. As the information backbone of the hospital, the HIS serves the needs of many caregivers across the hospital. But upgrading or adding on to existing information systems can be highly disruptive to physicians and patient care. This also comes with a heavy price tag in capital resources.

There is another option.
Many hospitals have leveraged their substantial investment in HIS by extending the value of these systems to physicians through a strategy of integration. Rather than allowing technology to become an obstacle for physicians, these innovative hospitals are improving the physicians’ experience with technology. They are delivering information from their HIS, together with information from multiple applications across the enterprise, through a suite of integrated physician-friendly applications. By adding physician-centric applications on top of existing hospital applications, facilities are affordably investing in physician satisfaction—a critical requirement in competitive hospital markets.

The PatientKeeper Physician Information System is an integration platform with a suite of physician applications designed to unlock the value of existing hospital information technology by:

• providing a more intuitive user interface
• integrating HIS data with information from ancillary systems such as PACS, EKG, lab, and e-prescribing, to provide a single point of access and sign-on, using a Web portal or mobile device.
• integrating patient data from inpatient and outpatient systems
• providing a business continuity solution during planned and unplanned HIS downtime.

Extending and Enhancing HIS
Physicians depend on access to patient information for countless activities: placing orders, prescribing, rounding and much more. And in a world where mobile computing is becoming the norm, giving physician’s access to clinical data anywhere, at any time, can be a valuable differentiator for a hospital.

PatientKeeper’s Physician Information System overcomes the traditional navigation challenges of HIS to gives physician point-and-click access to all patient data in a unified view through any computing device, including PCs, tablets, Smartphones and PDAs. So physicians can keep abreast of their patient’s status, whether they are on a patient unit, in a hospital hallway, at their private practice, at a child’s soccer game or at home.

In addition, the Physician Information System presents this data in a way that works best for physicians, with a single sign-on and an intuitive, customizable interface granting streamlined access to clinical data from multiple sources. This avoids the need for nursing staff to compile information for physicians, and provides a number of benefits for physicians:

• Single sign-on replaces the need to log on to different systems, locate a patient, obtain information, sign out, and then repeat the process with another system.

• Physicians can configure the user interface to fit their specific workflow. A hospitalist who rounds from the top floor of the facility down can organize his patient list for gravity rounding. Or an internist who begins her day checking on lab results can bring up a fishbone diagram, her preferred way to review results, with her first screen tap of the day.

• Cohesive data — from picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), electrocardiogram machines and fetal monitors, for example — gives physicians a more complete clinical picture of their patients.

• Teams can collaborate on patient care with shared patient lists and access to clinical information.

An alerting function keeps physicians apprised of any changes that may require action. In addition, the Physician Information System enables data interchange not only among multiple sites in the same hospital system but also across different organizations, which has important implications for communities that are building health information exchanges.

Providing a Downtime Solution
There is no room for system downtime in healthcare. Seamless access to patient data is critical—around the clock. Even if the downtime is scheduled, expensive workarounds are needed.

PatientKeeper provides a redundant clinical data repository that enables anywhere-anytime access to patient information. The PatientKeeper repository maintains an up-to-the minute, fully cached, database of patient information. Data stored in the PatientKeeper repository is as current as the last point of connection or data transmission, and users are notified when the main HIS is down and when it is back online. Any new patient data that is captured using the PatientKeeper Physician Information System applications when systems are down are then automatically synchronized once these other systems are up running again. This is an economical and highly effective solution to ensuring business continuity during both planned and unplanned system downtime. Furthermore, if the hardware for this system is physically located apart from the other hospital systems, it can also serve as an effective disaster recovery solution.

There is an Easier Way
Hospital information systems contain a goldmine of patient information, but because these systems were not designed for physician workflow, few institutions are extracting their full value. By integrating HIS data with a physician information system, hospitals are able to take physician satisfaction to a new level, provide integrated access to multiple clinical systems and even participate in community information sharing. PatientKeeper helps hospitals down the “last mile” toward monetizing their application investments by providing more useful clinical information accessible to users from anywhere, at any time, leading to greater physician satisfaction and enhanced patient care.