Las week InterSystems Corporation, a global leader in software for connected care, today made available a new release of InterSystems TrakCare with clinical and ease-of-use enhancements to support healthcare organizations in their mission to increase patient safety.
TrakCare is used in 25 countries around the world, with deployments ranging from single hospitals to nationwide networks. It supports the broadest spectrum of care settings – with clinical, administrative, laboratory, and community care capabilities – in a multi-language Internet-based healthcare information system unified by a single data repository.
The new release of TrakCare further enhances existing capabilities, which support healthcare organizations in achieving improved outcomes, including:
- Powerful «»closed loop»» medication management within a unified healthcare information system – improving patient safety and clinician productivity;
- New clinical summaries, alerts, «»break the glass»» capabilities and care planning worklists, combined with ease-of-use enhancements – providing a system that clinicians want to use;
- Patented technology for unlocking important information often hidden away in clinical notes.
United Family Hospitals and Clinics (UFH), a world-class healthcare organization in China that deployed TrakCare three years ago across its network of facilities, is deploying the new release for clinical governance and further operational improvements. «»InterSystems is continually enhancing TrakCare to remain at the forefront of best practices in healthcare information systems,»» said Jenny Shao, Health Information Systems Director for UFH. «»That is of great value to us in ensuring that we continue to offer world-class quality of care in our hospitals and clinics.»»
According to Christine Chapman, TrakCare Chief Operating Officer at InterSystems, «»Our development efforts to enhance the industry’s leading Internet-based healthcare information system are currently focused on areas like medication management, advanced analytics, and ease-of-use which offer the biggest potential to increase patient safety and clinician effectiveness.»»
Closed loop medication management on a unified platform
Medication management is a major focus of TrakCare development, with the goal of reducing medication errors, which are one of the biggest sources of preventable errors for most healthcare organizations. In TrakCare, all data relevant to medication management resides in a single repository and shared program logic allows doctors, pharmacists and nurses to work collaboratively. This unified, closed loop approach helps reduce medication errors and makes it easier to achieve time and cost savings through reductions in data entry, unnecessary communications, and stock wastage.
The new release of TrakCare offers electronic medication management functionality across electronic prescribing, dispensing and medication administration. It also includes significant enhancements in workflow, configurable medication charts, additional alert capabilities, and a new method of displaying alerts to reduce «»alert fatigue»» and make it easier for care providers to take immediate action.
Improving patient safety with clinical and ease-of-use enhancements
According to the new report on Health IT and Patient Safety from The Institute of Medicine, «»Software-related safety issues are often ascribed to software coding errors or human errors in using the software. It is rarely that simple. Many problems with health IT relate to usability, implementation, and how software fits with clinical workflow.»»
This realization guides the development of TrakCare. New clinical functions to increase patient safety and better coordinate care go hand-in-hand with ease-of-use enhancements to drive clinical productivity and adoption. «»InterSystems understands the challenges clinicians face with heavy workloads and managing multiple patients,»» said Chapman. «»That is why we focus our development efforts on the best way to present and process relevant information, so clinicians can remain focused on what matters most.»»
Enhanced clinical functionality in TrakCare includes new clinical summaries, alerts and «»break-the-glass»» capabilities, improved care planning and review worklists, and grids and planners for appointments, bed bookings, and operating theatre bookings. These are combined with ease-of-use and flexibility enhancements including a new Web interface with easier navigation to different functions and the ability to personalize information via Surgical Preferences, My Patient Lists and Clinical Summary Templates.
TrakCare also now includes a patented technology called iKnow which analyses and indexes unstructured data to unlock the value of important information held in clinical notes or any other type of free text, regardless of its source. Unlike competing semantic and search technologies, iKnow automatically indicates the most meaningful elements in the data without needing any input from the user, not even a search term.
