Business process window

Let New Age Systems help you harness the power of your information to monitor and manage the performance of your organization. Healthcare organizations typically follow an antiquated and parochial process for using data to make decisions within the organization. A great deal of information is collected and stored about patients and patient care processes. Unfortunately, the data is often spread across multiple disparate systems, making it difficult or impossible to utilize in an integrated manner.

For example, how efficient is the medication delivery process at your facility? From the time the physician places the medication order until it is actually administered to the patient, there are numerous opportunities for delays and errors. Can the manager detect when this process is beginning to spin out of control and intervene before harm comes to the patient or length of stay is increased? Or, how many times have you had patients leave before being seen because they were tired of waiting in a crowded waiting room? A real time monitor to track your wait time performance could be very useful. When wait times begin to creep beyond acceptable standards, as defined by your organization, the system could alert or notify the responsible individual so that immediate intervention can be taken BEFORE patients begin to abandon ship.

We at New Age Systems believe that information technology must play a central role in the redesign of the healthcare system if a substantial improvement in performance and quality of care is to be achieved. As an alternative to costly integrated systems, the New Age Systems solution monitors process performance by capitalizing on the wealth of information and decision support capacity already present in your existing computer systems. Executives, managers, and front-line workers need real-time access to operational data in order to make good decisions. We can help you get operating data from multiple sources to support immediate decisions, rather than at the end of the quarter when it's too late to do anything. The benefits are high and the costs are low.

Workflow

Our performance monitoring solution is a data integration and clinical decision support tool that harnesses the power of information already captured in existing disparate computer systems. The information is used in real-time to monitor processes, and prevent them from becoming problems by triggering alerts or notification to those responsible for ensuring that the processes run smoothly. In this way your organization will better utilize and communicate knowledge so that timely interventions can be taken to avoid or minimize problems. Here's how it works…

• Data is captured from HL7 interface messages or other methods, such as time stamped data, patient information, orders, and others.
• Data is converted to XML.
• XML data is parsed into a short term database.
• Rules are applied against the data using Microsoft BizTalk.
• Performance measures are displayed or communicated to responsible individuals via alerting process or monitoring screens.

For example, Mrs. Jones was assessed by nursing as being at risk for skin breakdown (decubitus ulcer). A score representing this assessed risk is entered into the online nursing assessment tool. Based on this score, the nurse places orders based on the facility's skin breakdown prevention protocol. This includes the utilization of an egg crate mattress. Six hours after the initial order, the rules engine detects that a charge for the egg crate mattress has not been received for Mrs. Jones, and triggers an alert via pager to the unit secretary, who looks into the situation and quickly ensures that Mrs. Jones receives her egg crate mattress. This timely intervention potentially prevented Mrs. Jones from developing a decubitus ulcer, a serious complication increasing length of stay and cost. In this example, the New Age Systems performance monitoring solution utilized the skin breakdown assessment score from the online nursing assessment system and the HL7 order message for the egg crate mattress. Based on this information, the New Age Systems rules engine watched for an HL7 message containing a charge for an egg crate mattress. When such a charge did not come across within 6 hours subsequent to the time the order was placed, the rules engine triggered the alert.

Performance alerts are communicated via e-mail, cell phone, pager or printer. For example, the responsible manager can be paged or e-mailed at the first sign that a process is beginning to approach threshold. Additionally, New Age Systems has designed an executive web monitor view which continually delivers performance metrics about processes within the purview of a specific executive, such as the VP of Nursing or Chief Operating Officer.

Technology Overview

New Age Systems's performance monitoring solution is completely web based. It is written in Microsoft .Net. Data is obtained from source system(s) using any number of methods, including HL7 interfaces, EDI, screen scrape, FTP, flat file, printer output, batch, html, etc. New Age Systems converts the data to XML, and utilizes MicroSoft BizTalk as the Rules Engine. XML data is parsed into a short term SQL database.

Hardware and software requirements:

• Windows 2000 server
• Microsoft BizTalk
• IIS
• Microsoft.net
• Microsoft SQL 2000
• Microsoft Message Queuing
• PC Anywhere