InterSystems Corporation, a global maker of software for connected care, announced that Royal District Nursing Service (RDNS), an Australian provider of home nursing, has chosen InterSystems HealthShare as their strategic healthcare informatics platform to improve services and lower costs.
HealthShare provides RDNS with a single technology for interoperability between different healthcare information systems, with support for workflows, business rules and active analytics to create innovative connected care solutions.
«»This is a strategic investment and we are expecting to get great value out of it,»» said Ainsley Pollock, General Manager – Solutions for RDNS. «»HealthShare will help us automate our processes right across the enterprise. The business will benefit with workflow improvements and reduced handling of data, and patients will benefit from more accurate service delivery at a lower cost.»»
Pollock cited two examples expected to make more efficient use of resources. Firstly, HealthShare can pass data from clinical to financial systems and apply complex rules to automate most of the billing process and create exception reports. «»Instead of a finance person struggling for four hours checking data in spreadsheets, HealthShare can create a web portal view as part of the workflow which they can process in 30 minutes,»» said Pollock.
HealthShare will also be used to deliver information from the triage application used by accredited nurses to provide specialist clinical advice such as catheter management plans. Instead of communicating with nurses over the phone and manually updating care plans, HealthShare can automatically insert information from the nurse triage system as a patient record in the clinical system on nurses’ tablet computers and, potentially, update the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR).
A major driver for connected care solutions is the projected shortage of nurses to handle the «»silver tsunami»» of ageing baby boomers requiring home care, said Pollock. «»Changes in the healthcare and aged care industries mean that RDNS needs to quickly respond to opportunities. We need to be ready to interface to the PCEHR and other connected care initiatives like the Human Services Directory and the Chronic Disease Medication Systems Network.»»
That increased agility lowers the cost of IT systems, Pollock said. «»With HealthShare we can more easily refresh our systems and move quickly to meet new requirements. It means we can provide a lower cost of IT ownership and that directly reduces the hourly cost of a nurse.»»
RDNS currently maintains over 50 applications with a substantial effort required to integrate new systems via point-to-point interfaces. RDNS expects HealthShare to reduce this effort by at least 50%. Initially, HealthShare will integrate five core systems – Rostering, Client Management, HL7 Clinical Messaging, Human Resources and Finance – with new systems added over time.
The solution will also improve the reliability of information services. With no central information exchange, RDNS could not previously monitor the status of interfaces between different information systems. In the future, if there is a problem in the interface between the rostering and client management systems, for example, HealthShare will pro-actively generate an alert before the productivity of nurses is affected.
A key differentiator between HealthShare and alternative tendered solutions is the ease with which RDNS can employ redundancy with server mirroring to further improve reliability. Taking advantage of the inbuilt mirroring capabilities of the InterSystems CACHɮdatabase, RDNS will deploy HealthShare at its St Kilda headquarters and a mirror site 10km away.
«»There is growing recognition that current healthcare delivery models are in need of transformation and it is precisely the sort of solutions RDNS is deploying with HealthShare that are vital in achieving that objective,»» said Steve Garrington, Group Commercial Director at InterSystems.
Source: www.intersystems.com
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